


Sherlock Ambroteros

by Sophonisba



Category: Highlander: The Series, Matter of Britain, Matter of France, Robin Hood (Traditional), Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms, Sherlock Holmes - Arthur Conan Doyle, Tyrfing Cycle
Genre: Footnotes, Literary References, Multi, dispassionate ponderings of potentially squicky subjects, mentions of severe physical trauma, results of Sherlockian experiments
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2011-02-20
Updated: 2011-06-03
Packaged: 2017-10-15 19:16:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 15
Words: 21,840
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/164092
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sophonisba/pseuds/Sophonisba
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>But of all the names he has borne since, of renown or of infamy, his favorite is that of Sherlock Holmes: not for its denotation (which, as mentioned aforetimes, is usually inaccurate), but for its connotations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> It's been years since I was skulking around the edges of Highlander fandom and I haven't seen any of it for longer than that, so I no longer remember exactly which details were canon, which personal spackle, and which someone else's idea shiny enough to be seized on with personal epiphany; and my Holmesian deuterocanon has been influenced by so many people that I can't remember who came up with what. Still, while some of these are public domain, none of them are mine.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> They aren't all foundlings.

"Guher" means "golden-haired." (Well, technically, "gold" or "golden," in a language that was old before ever Julius Caesar crossed the narrow seas.)

So, for that matter, does "Aurelius."

Absent extensive post-bleach dyeing, neither name has ever been accurate; but that didn't stop him from seizing on "Sherlock" as an appropriate translation for them.

(Even if his brother did quibble that it would be more appropriate for an adoptee of the Flavia clan; anyone who has willingly called himself "Mycroft" has no room to talk, as Sherlock will happily remind him again and again and again.)

  


* * *

They aren't all foundlings.

(Even if he was one.)

That's just the most pervasive of the origin myths. It's probably enhanced by the human desire to distance oneself from a family member who's just done something blatantly Not Right, but it's also true that a disproportionate number of them were. The same factor, whatever it might be, that will later in life give them the ability to heal once they've died also causes it to operate during the first few months of infancy -- and perchance even the first few years of childhood, but one can't really test that, not without a greater disregard for the consequences of one's actions than their mother/teacher would ever have let her disciples retain -- perhaps not as well as it will later, and possibly not to the extent of healing major wounds, but pre-Immortal neonates will survive illness, exposure, dehydration, and even starvation far better than their merely mortal counterparts; yet that merely ensures that a foundling is more likely to become an Immortal, not that an Immortal is more likely to have been a foundling.

 _'I was accidentally dropped into the ocean when I was a baby," the man who was yet to be called Mycroft said once. 'When the waves cast me up, once I'd coughed up all the water I apparently was very loud about my distaste for the whole affair.'_

 _'How do you know you were the same baby?' Guher, who had as yet never even heard of the name Sherlock, demanded. 'That one could have drowned and you washed up in its place; it's not as if babies don't look alike, and your mother would have been eager enough for her son to be alive that she wouldn't necessarily have been checking for any signs that he wasn't.'_

 _'It's not impossible,' and it was unfair that his new brother could sound so calm and collected, 'but as I was cast up in what appeared to be the same wrappings, and I bear a strong resemblance to my late mother and an even stronger one to her brother, it requires less unfounded postulates to assume I am the son born of her body than to assume I'm not.'_

But it's easier, sometimes, to tell themselves that they were, to try to cut the connection to mortals that fade and wither and die in the blink of an eye; just as it's easier to tell themselves that they couldn't have had children even before their first death, or even that they are not dead men walking.

Teachers and fellow-students are the only family Immortals have a chance of keeping for a length of time. The little family that for a while called itself Holmes and before that Aurelia(n) was even more so than most: the "mother" had taken in the more energetic of her sons in his early childhood, and then married the man who later adopted the other "brother" as his heir -- before the latter's first death, while the first-mentioned "brother" was still very much their mother's apprentice (and privately, if not publicly, acknowledged as her son by his stepfather and mother herself).

If his mother and brother could somehow be convinced that Sherlock is in fact older and wiser than Guher was when the former took him in, he would be grateful indeed; but as it hasn't happened in all these centuries, he isn't inclined to hold his breath.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It's just... not very easy to tell where it changes or by how much, or to empathize with someone suffering physical pain without perennially at least wanting to ask "but how does that WORK?"

When she first found him, his mother went to great lengths to keep the boy she would later name Guher alive, even bleeding herself into a pipette and introducing it into his veins to replace the blood the boy had lost.

(With his current knowledge of blood types, Sherlock is amazed that that actually worked. His mother had remarked far earlier that transfusions were more likely to kill than cure, but that at that point they really hadn't had much of anything left to lose.)

This set the pattern for the rest of his childhood: Guher got into trouble and his family tried to keep it from actively killing him, at least while he was undersized.

It would undoubtedly have been... considerably... easier had the relevant nerves been capable of communicating anything but pleasure to his brain: pain and its message of "Don't do that then!" is an excellent reinforcement/substitute for the logical reasoning that an immature mind is incapable of properly grokking, and even an intelligent child will have trouble remembering to avoid bee stings and keep his fingers out of the fire and away from the knife when his nerves tell him "Oy, do that some more."

It also -- he gets that people don't like to be grieved or humiliated, he does, he loathes and despises it himself. He understands that people being different, certain types of pleasure are uncomfortable and distasteful enough for some people that they don't hesitate to call them by the same name they give to distress of mind or heart.

It's just... not very easy to tell where it changes or by how much, or to empathize with someone suffering physical pain without perennially at least wanting to ask "but how does that WORK?" Or to realize whether an answer has been elicited by discomfort (reasonably likely to be true) or duress (almost sure to be whatever the answerer thinks the querent wants to hear).

 _He tried to explain it to Marian, once, after he'd gone too far with his questioning (that's what she's there for, too, to rein him in lest he break a leg or ride someone down)._

 _'Oh, so should I do this \-- ' Marian said, and kicked him between the legs, snake-strike-swift._

 _The world went bright and it was so suddenly, overwhelmingly good that his legs buckled under him and he stared up at her, gasping for breath until he managed to get out 'Shouldn't I... have offered you... a token... or something... before granted such an intimate liberty?'_

 _Marian stared down at him for a moment before her shoulders relaxed and her face smoothed from anger to weary patience tinged with fond understanding._

 _'Anything delivered with at least enough force to get a stone across a stream doesn't count,' she explained._

 _He picked her a nosegay later anyway. After kicking Jenkin and Will for laughing: just because they'd unaccountably stayed with him for a century didn't mean that they were of any help whatsoever in dealing with the woman._

He asked his brother later if she'd been right; his brother, after slamming his legs together with a wince as if confronted with a sudden and piercing stench at the beginning of the explanation, had said "More or less," and added "Unless I'm required to hunt down the perpetrators, I have no desire to hear from you about anything else you or some other person have done to your bollocks. Ever."

 _(He tries to explain it to John, once, the day after John pulls him off someone and demands to know what he thought he was playing at [that's what he's there for, too, to apply the brakes lest Sherlock run someone over or spin out at a curve]._

 _"So if I did this \-- " John says, and shoots out his hands like lightning to grasp Sherlock by one arm and the other shoulder, fingers unerringly digging precisely into nerve clusters._

 _The world goes bright, and it is only John's rock-solid grip that holds him vertical at the expense of yet more pressure, dizzy and robbed of breath and unexpectedly, unwittingly perfect._

 _"Shouldn't there... have been dinner and... dancing first?" Sherlock manages in a moment, long practice letting him draw in air even around the starbursts of sensation._

 _John flushes a dull, brick red, and eases him down into a chair, muttering "Sorry," and then, turning away and softer, "Should have allowed for your being completely mental." He shrugs his shoulders once, decision in every line of his frame, turns back to Sherlock, and declares "I'm going out, is there anything you'd like from the shops?"_

 _"Milk, oven cleaner, a toasting fork, some fennel, and two point five meters of half-inch copper tubing, if you would."_

 _"And... you know what, I don't even want to know."_

 _But when he texts John to leave the shopping and come hunt down a left-handed flautist, his new blogger seems to have recovered his usual composure -- although he does wish by the end of the afternoon that John had finished the shopping: now the case is over, he feels the absence of fresh crisp fennel.)_

At least when his boundless curiosity finally led Guher -- answering to "Peretur" by that point -- into something he couldn't get out of (nor his mother or stepfather do it for him, although evidence suggests that they might have finally stopped bothering as much), he'd finally stopped growing up. His brother says that had Peretur survived a few more years, he too might have put on another layer of muscle, backing up his soul's power with raw physical strength; as it is, Sherlock Holmes remains a tall skinny git, apparently running on pure willpower.

(Which isn't as bad as it might be; Mother's nearly always skinny too, and it makes it rather easier to blend into a crowd when necessary. The man he will never tire of calling Mycroft, however, has over the years had to pay his tailors several fortunes to disguise that musculature and make him look a mere clerk or doctor, more so whenever fashion shifts away from billowing gowns; at least during those times when he has the luxury of a more sedentary lifestyle, Mycroft has indulged his appetite and cloaked his thews in subcutaneous fat.)


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If there's one thing that Sherlock and Mycroft and Mother _(Mami_ [Mummy] _)_ all agree on, it's that the Game as practiced by most so-called Immortals is utter rubbish.

If there's one thing that Sherlock and Mycroft and Mother _(Mami_ [Mummy] _)_ all agree on, it's that the Game as practiced by most so-called Immortals is utter rubbish.

(It's rather ridiculous to apply the name "immortal" to something capable of being killed, for that matter, but it's an enshrined and accepted term, like "park"-ing a vehicle, or being concerned with "who's sleeping with who," or being a professional "mistress." [Or a professional "whore," even.] Probably some scribe absentmindedly wrote "immortalis" for "immortuus," back before Sherlock was born.)

Running around killing your fellows, the only beings who are likely to really understand you, for the sake of some legendary Prize whose nature is not only not certain but not ascertainable, is almost a lexical definition of Faulty Logic.

Mother says that as long as she can remember, there have been mentions of a Game, but that running around killing each other for the Game seems to have started sometime in the last two thousand (three thousand) years.

Her sons are fairly sure that it started as an attempt to cheat by reducing the competition. Occasionally they've wondered what would happen if, by the time of the Gathering, none of the surviving players were eligible to win. Now and then, Sherlock's speculated that the Gathering actually happened centuries ago, and nobody noticed.

(Mycroft knows that the Game was last won in 1986, and that its winner not unnaturally decided that since nobody would ever believe him, he'd just quietly go about using his prize to make the world a better place -- which in practice came to mean working for Mycroft. One of his best undercover operatives, in fact.)

Since it's utter rubbish, naturally they don't play. If at all possible. Mother makes a vocation out of being largely unnoticeable or at least a mere assistant to flashier personalities (except for now and then, such as that time in Armoric Britania, which started out as mere lieutenantship) and of pulling up stakes and disappearing to another part of the world if rumor ever rises to a dull roar.

Mycroft, for his part, spends as much of his life as possible on ground that has never been formally desecrated (it's astonishing, how often people don't bother when leaving a place or selling it off. Quite extraordinary. And while many of post-Norman London's churches have been desecrated as a matter of course when no longer in use as religious sites, neither the Romano-British fleeing the Angles and later Saxons nor the earlier tribes fleeing the Romans had time to bother [and that's not even taking into account the many house chapels, Puritan services in somebody's not-yet-called-a-parlor, or ceremonial spaces for alternate faiths wherever they could hide them or rent the room], even if many of those sites are oddly shaped, or none too accessible, or relatively small, or one of the downstairs men's lavs at Charing Cross Hospital), and much of the time in between one or the other in guarded and/or armored transport. He has been in the habit for long years now of making each identity in turn valuable enough to Government or a department thereof that it will take a very, very dim view of unaffiliated persons attempting to challenge him to duels or kill him outright, and devote agents to the cause of finding such persons and neutralizing them before they can act.

(It does make him notable enough that the Watchers finally identified him in the late 1980s as an Immortal who has worked for the British Government in some capacity since 1947. This is minor enough that he has allowed it to stand until they go almost completely online, as it will be easier then to slip a subtle worm into their databases after arranging a discreet burglary of an offsite hard-copy storage facility or two. It also meant that the Hunters were foolish enough to send a team after him, and a second team after the first; the Watchers have so far been too preoccupied with their restructuring to poke at that particular black hole, although the families of those Hunters who had them have of course been officially notified of their kinsman's accidental death.)

Sherlock used to explain to his challengers, first, that he wasn't playing; and second, that they could either go away and leave him alone, or he could use them to test whether there were any methods of rendering an Immortal permanently defunct besides complete decapitation. From these and other tests, he has concluded:

  * an Immortal's Quickening will decamp provided the spine is severed at the C7 vertebra or higher (provided the spine is fully severed, the rest of the neck can remain intact without any effect on said Quickening).
  * Destroying a complete lateral cross-section of cervical spine or medulla oblongata via fire, corrosive, etc. counts as severing.
  * an Immortal can regenerate all of the brain save the medulla oblongata, but regenerated brain is tabula rasa tissue, whatever memories were there before lost. (Certain people have the annoying habit of hitting him in the head; Mother taught Sherlock to keep appropriately coded journals, so that when he does lose memories to cranial trauma he can restore anything particularly important.) Occasionally taking a Quickening can jump-start some of those lost memories again: Sherlock isn't quite sure whether it's just that the cerebral damage had been confined to his brain's address-book or that the entire memory section of the brain is a mere address-book for records engraved in an -- he hesitates to use the words "astral plane," beloved as they are of charlatans and unthinking dreamers, but he cannot think of another succinct explanation; the transference of memories with Quickenings suggests the latter, but the current impossibility of direct observation makes it a hypothesis of limited practical use and an insult to Sherlock's sense of the fitness of things.
  * For that matter, an Immortal can regenerate any non-spine-or-brain soft tissue that's cut off or out. Eventually. Premortem scar tissue tends to regenerate as scar tissue, though, especially (for some reason) when it's part of the person's self-image. (Later research suggests that Immortal organs aren't particularly good as donor organs, though; they seem to set off nonpre-Immortal immune systems even more than their merely mortal counterparts do.)
  * Regenerating entire bones or missing digits/limbs depends on how powerful the Immortal's Quickening is.

Quickenings get powerful both from just aging, like fine wines or ancient oaks, and/or from absorbing other Quickenings.

  * After a certain amount of damage, Immortal bodies will start running out of energy to heal as quickly as they might, and -- especially if they would heal only to die again -- slow down the process immensely, taking a long, long time to cannibalize their Quickenings.

Removing the immediate lethality and/or watering them or feeding them broth/blancmange/etc. or giving them a transfusion of Immortal blood (or of Quickening, should one know how to do energy tricks) will start them trying the process all over again, though.

(Sherlock supposes that this means that any number of mummies whose medullae oblongatae were missed with the brainhooks might be lying in their tombs, waiting only to be brought to fresh air and perhaps unwrapped to start revivifying. For some reason, neither his mother nor his brother seem to regard this notion with admiration or even equanimity.)

  * This also applies to cutting Immortals in half below the C7 vertebra -- without continually pouring sustenance into them, unless they're powerful enough to get it all from cannibalizing their own Quickening, they'll just keep on dying until they've regenerated enough of themselves to be able to survive indefinitely with care (and, sans care, will once more keep on dying). With the regeneration process continually halted by this cessation of function, it can take a LONG time.
  * A powerful enough Quickening will absorb the other one it's given untrammeled access to, regardless of whose body they're in at the time. Sherlock himself has jumped bodies a few times via this method; Mother rather more, and often enough switched genders.

 _(The Kurgan's failure to overwrite his younger and considerably less experienced defeater was Mycroft's first clew that something out of the ordinary had gone on.)_

  * The absorption at least brings muscle memory; the absorbing Immortals are recognizable enough to anyone who's ever felt the taste of their Quickenings; and the longer they spend in the new body, the more their "healing factor" rewrites the body to look like their own self-image. Mother says that sex is the last to change, and often enough has stayed female as long as she felt female. Sherlock can verify that facial features and hair color are the first alterations -- save for his own peculiar inability to process physical pain; directly on waking up in his new body, he's felt a sort of interesting all-over... discomfort that three hours of discussion and a few Interesting Quickening Tricks have established is near-identical to the whole-body ache his mother feels on arriving in a new body, but both of those fade quickly enough and subsequent injuries feel as pleasant to him as ever.
  



_(Peretur asked, once, whether that made Mami really a man or a woman._

 _"Both," Mami said thoughtfully, shaving away a stripe of beard, "although more so whatever I am at the moment. Feel free to refer to me as 'mater meus' while I'm like this, though. Or still 'mater mea,' if you're more comfortable with it."_

 _Peretur had already decided that the best way to learn everything that his new Immortal lifespan would let him would be to not even try to pay attention to anything that wasn't relevant to his interests: as long as his mother wasn't not a woman, therefore, he saw no reason to try to remember a different set of pronouns and adjectival declensions when they were only liable to suddenly change again. The same sort of reasoning would later lead him to remain uninterested in any new discoveries about the nature of the universe unlikely to affect his life on the earth's face: why on earth should he bother to remember the new shape of the known universe when it'll only change again once they learn more about it?)_

The reputation Sherlock got from this did tend to mean that he was often enough left alone (although it was also the reason for most of the few times he wound up absorbing somebody else bodily); by the time he had run out of experiments on Immortal mortality to perform on those too stupid and immoral to take no for an answer, he was able to tell them that they could either go away and leave him alone, or he could arrange to have them arrested for stalking and/or trespass and/or attempted murder, where even should the charges not stick or they kill themselves on the spot, they and their fingerprints would be made known to the local police.

(Some people still, despite those warnings, believe that they can retrieve their fingerprints after the fact. Sherlock sees no reason whatsoever to play fair with those people; despite the utility of such inventions as silencers and air-guns, finding a place to temporarily stash a corpse with extensive cranial damage and getting it there is never going to be trivial, and should one possess a brother with the ability to make the past half-hour of manhandling corpse not have happened, he clearly has the ability both to take care of one's own fingerprints in time [not that one cares overmuch for that, not really] and to arrange for an intruder's fingerprints to be duplicated in several very inconvenient places.)


	4. Chapter 4

Three names Sherlock answered to before his First Death: Guher Aurelius, which his mother named him when first she took him up with her; Peretur Longspear, which he took on on his mother's recommendation, rather than add yet one more Guher to a warband-and-followers full of them; Anniannioc, which he was dubbed by Caius Longus (the First File had a positive gift for nailing people with ekenames that stuck).

But of all the names he has borne since, of renown or of infamy, his favorite is that of Sherlock Holmes: not for its denotation (which, as mentioned aforetimes, is usually inaccurate), but for its connotations.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **First File:** _Lat._ primus pilus _, the centurion at the head of the first of the files (front-to-back rows) the legion was divided into, who was the first centurion of the legion and the NCO who actually ran the thing; almost inevitably a badass among badasses._


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> If you live long enough, sooner or later people _will_ come to remind you of other people you've met.

If you live long enough, sooner or later people will come to remind you of other people you've met. Sometimes it can be as simple as a family resemblance: the Gregsons have been giving sons and later daughters to the Yard since Sir Robert Peel founded his Metropolitan Police, the Lestrades nearly as long (although half the family decided to change their surname's pronunciation back to the original Norman during the occupation of the Channel Islands as some sort of gesture of solidarity, just to confuse people), and while Sally Donovan wouldn't appear at first glance to recall her strong and kind and good (if possessed of certain blind spots in his perspicacity) great-great-grandfather, she is the spit and image of the woman Sherlock knew as said man's elder brother's natural daughter Sarah Donovan: one of the first women to be retained by Scotland Yard as typists, one of its few employees then (and few women of the class she did credit to, the blinkered views of idiots notwithstanding, in England at that time) to use her brain for something other than keeping her skull from imploding, the inspiration for the Yard's Female Division*, and the first woman of the Met to be killed in the line of duty.

(Sherlock still is sure that he should have moved faster. He should have seen what she was planning to do in time to keep her from doing it. Miss Donovan had no right whatsoever to take a bullet for him, even had he been merely mortal.

At least Sally is unlikely to do as much, the way he bollocks up trying to befriend her.)

Other times inheritance is unlikely: the Lestrades are probably not related to Jenkin. (The latter never was sure where his Flemish mercenary foster-father picked him up, but it's unlikely to have been anywhere southwest of the Somme or Britain south of the Welland. Moreover, Jenkin was as massive as Boduir Berca would have proportionally been had he been as tall as Caius Longus [or almost as large as Boduir's soul, if the rumors about his sending it walking around in bear-shape had had any truth to them], and even today not many Lestrades are above average height.) Nor either him nor them to Astawulf, although at least tying Jenkin to old Mark athelings would make a bit more sense. That didn't stop Jenkin from recalling Astawulf to his mind or the Lestrades from reminding him of both of them, especially when obstinately refusing either to see the obvious or to let Sherlock go do something that, very well, might be more than a little dangerous.

Sometimes the resemblance is perfectly clear to his mind and perfectly ridiculous -- unless that cycles thing is true, which he rather thinks his mother believes but whose adherents have thrown up so much falsity in the name of proof that it's hardly worth investigating, save for confidence fradulences -- and yet he could not stop a part of his mind, flush with the joy of discovery and ebulliating all over whatever colleagues and associates of colleagues might be handy, from perceiving said colleague's wasted wounded half-caste further-sunbaked veteran companion and noting, simply, _Oliver_.

(And another part almost immediately concluding 'Wait, does this mean I have to bespeak my brother a dinner of dormice stewed with honey and oranges again? In London? SODDING ARACHOSIA.')

Sometimes it's a fragmentary, momentary resemblance; he has seldom since seen a head of truly red hair without it bringing Fridiricu to mind, however little the rest of the situation might conform (Fridiricu, at least, would have been highly unlikely to fall for a get-rich-quick scheme, but would have truly enjoyed copying out a Britannica. Or Wikipedia. Although it would have been difficult to restrain him from spending most of his time editing the latter.)

And sometimes it's as simple as that, because Marian eclipsed all others of her sex for him (except for his mother, who doesn't count as a woman even if she isn't not one), any particularly capable and competent and respect-inducing woman can't help but remind him of her. It took him a long time to be able to refer to someone else as "the woman" even in his head, and even then he wasn't attracted to Granuaile, or Kristina, or Amanda, or Jane (either one), or Irene/La Carina. Which is undoubtedly just as well, as it was awkward enough dealing with them as it was.

(While Sherlock has at most a one in a million chance of actually being attracted to another person -- or at least, as much attracted as someone like him can feel, who has never yet felt the grasp of Aphrodite Pandemos -- he's met rather more than a million people: it adds up over time.)

He has numbered men as well as women among the very, very few souls he has been attracted to in the past, but the man -- and it was one man, he's sure of that now even if he can't prove it \-- who eclipsed all others of his sex for Sherlock Holmes didn't attract him in that way, but was his friend. (Well, when he says "friend," he means -- he isn't sure there's a word for what he means, but suspects it would be some variation on a translation of " _heureka!_ ")

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * _In our world, the "Women Police Patrols" weren't official until 1918, twenty years later, although there were various volunteer auxiliary organizations beforehand; the Female Division was invented by Baroness Orczy for Lady Molly of Scotland Yard._


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The fact remains that, when Sherlock is truly, truly at the end of his rope, he will turn to his brother.

Sherlock's (or Guher's, or Peretur's, etc.) relationship with his brother hasn't always been fraught with tension: they've known each other far too long to hold grudges for more than a century or so, even if they're too different to be able to live together for a fraction of that time without getting on each other's last nerve.

Interimmortal familial relationships that last tend to the odder ends of the spectrum and to blur the lines denoting relationships. While Peretur's (Guher's) stepfather didn't adopt an heir until the death of his own legitimate (by his first wife, naturally) son, and then chose a youth who'd already proved himself in battle and otherwise, he nodded to family feeling by choosing the most talented of his sisters' younger sons: Peretur had known his mother's stepnephew for years before being asked to accept him as a brother, and still remembers when the youth followed him around to listen to him deduce and induce and to make sure he didn't walk under any horses while tracking their hoofprints.

(If Mycroft remembers it, he doesn't let on.)

It'd be completely unfair for Mycroft to count as the elder brother just because he took longer to get himself killed, but it is generally agreed (by him and their mother, at any rate) that his big brotherhood transcends mere chronology; and he feels himself heir to his own elder brother's responsibilities even though he'd been adopted out of the direct line since, and anyway one of the brothers possesses elementary common sense and it isn't Sherlock. (The fact that Sherlock has thought of Mycroft as his big brother since well before either of them was named as much doesn't have anything to do with it, of course. Obviously. Sherlock is sure that Mycroft and Mother only bring it up to spite him.)

The fact remains that, when Sherlock is truly, truly at the end of his rope, he will turn to his brother.

>   
> _("You can stop asking for me under the name of 'no one': I told you, it was from 'nemus,' and it's not as if I haven't had to set that identity aside now the younger generation of our kinsmen-by-abrogation are asking awkward questions -- Guher? What's in the box?"_
> 
>  _"Oliver," Guher said vaguely, his attention near-totally focused on the box he was embracing, the way its corners bit into his arms noted and set aside as unworthy of consideration._
> 
>  _He was dimly aware of his brother cursing, mustering him indoors and up a flight of stairs and onto a day-couch; awareness returned a little when his brother tried to take Oliver's bones from him, but Guher's renewed death-grip seemed enough of a clew for his big brother's renowned perspicacity, and instead he felt warm furs laid over him and his burden as he finally surrendered the frail breakwaters made of pure willpower and gave himself over fully to the melancholia.)_

*

 _ **Transcription of a cipher written in a Brito-Latin-Old Saxon creole with Gothic influences, sent to Master Cedric Martyn of the Mercer's Guild in London as an addenda to letters to various agents:**  
Guher Longspear to his excellent brother: since when is it possible for a pre-Immortuus to take on the soul of a full Immortuus?_

 _**Transcription of another sample of that cipher in that same creole, sent by privy means to the English court-in-exile in France:**  
Longspear, what HAVE you done now?_

 _**Transcription of a different cipher written in Arabic, likewise sent to Master Martyn:**  
Wanted not to die, mostly. That brat, on the other hand -- and do you realize his mother is encouraging me (thinking me him) to indulge all my bloodthirstiest impulses? I think she feels delightfully stabbed every time I mention wholesale decapitation._

 _**Transcription of its answer:**  
Only you. Presumably your glut of experiments is responsible for this latest defiance of the mores of nature. Kindly attempt to persist in not dying until Mami can verify that you are in fact pre-Immortal._

 _**Testimony of Henry Butler, gentleman, against Sir Ambrose, clerk:**  
And then Sir Ambrose, examining closely the said Edward, did make to him various and sundry gestures, to which the said Edward seemed to hearken; and on the next occasion Sir Ambrose came in sight of the same Edward, he did smile, and make to him the same sign as first he did before, that is with his thumb._

 _**Testimony of Sir Ambrose, clerk, in his own behalf:**  
And satisfied in my own mind that the lord Edward was in nowise the son of his purported father, I made him the gesture of the spectators at the old amphitheaters of the pagan Romans, which is to say: Give him the sword. And likewise I drew with my hands the symbols of several most potent poisons, inasmuch as to say: It would be well did you ingest one or all of these._

 _**Recommendation on Sir Ambrose's case:**  
REMAND FROM TREASON TO WITCHCRAFT CHARGES._

 _**Transcription of yet a third cipher in Arabic, delivered some years later into the hand of the Lady Anne and shown by her to her newly acquired lord and master and the dam that bore him:**  
Have arranged for small party of headhunters I've been fobbing off with protestations of current usefulness to intercept you after your future yet inevitable defeat. I presume you know how to un-endear yourself to them._

 _**Translation of a sealed letter, written in a Brito-Latin-Old Saxon creole with Gothic influences and kept in the purse of Edmund Brakesbury, esquire:**  
Funds on deposit at Mercer's Guild in name of Robert Wall, gentleman, for possessor of this signet._

 _**Excerpt from letter from Robert Wall, gentleman, to Master Cedric Martyn, assistant comptroller to the Duke of Clarence:**  
[...] and so, finding my old friends in London still abroad or with hope and the grace of God residing in a better place than this, I make bold to apply to you in the hope that you may know of some position both vacant and not (underlined three times) dull.  
Has there been any report of those missing gentlemen of the lord duke's? I hear that robbers and looters were out in force after the battle, and judge it likely that a small party may have been ambushed and expediently murdered for the prize one or more of them may have been thought to be carrying._

*

>   
> _( **Telegram sent from the Otel Timur, Samarkand, to Mycroft Holmes, Grey Peacocks, Ledlington, Norfolk, and forwarded to the Diogenes Club, City of Westminster, London:**  
>  MISSING LAST DECADE STOP SOMEWHERE TO BE QUERY SEND MONEY GUHER.)_   
> 

Their current argument is partly over the fact that Mycroft thinks Sherlock is wasting his skill sets running around playing detective (Mother doesn't think it's a case of misapplied talent; she does, however, rather firmly believe that it leaves her "younger" son far more open to headhunters and exposure than need be -- not that she should have any room to talk, with the company she's been keeping since the mid-'nineties) and should leave it to the relevant authorities, while Sherlock's love of the chase and the puzzle is only overwhelmed by the reaction to the something he might almost call "pain" he feels when in the presence of arrant stupidity applied to one of his fields of interest -- a reaction to preserve himself from it, not merely by the short-term method of avoiding it, but by MAKING others see what he see so that he need not speak with them as a child of childish things. Moreover, in his darker moments Sherlock can readily believe that if Mycroft hadn't gone to a great deal of trouble to, if not efface them from the recent historical record entirely -- hard to do to a prolific technical writer and inventor of marslenin and artificial pancrein* -- render them largely forgettable to the next generation and uninteresting to the following ones, ratocination and pathology would have been subjects of far greater interest: people would want to challenge themselves against puzzles in books, at least some films would have featured accurate forensic pathology rather than the ever-popular Make It Up To Fit The Script, popular authors would have dedicated new books to pioneers in the field of legal medicine and perhaps even championed open reviews of largely cold cases, and Sherlock himself would not be perennially trying to goad and entice the Met up to a minimal standard of competence.

It isn't even as if his brother's always been writing them back out of history, either. Back in the day, he wrote them into it as often as not. (Well, Sherlock did sort of begin it, but considering what the trouvère was getting stuck with writing about their mother, it was an act of charity.)

* * *

> 'What have you in your saddlebags to bring to dine with us, good franklin?'
> 
> 'As if you can't see it for yourself...'
> 
> 'I'm not asking to discover what it might be.' Really, his brother had used to be good at this, outstripping him himself. 'I'm asking to test what you'll tell us.'
> 
> 'Do I have anything on me that you can neither see nor reason the presence of, you may keep it with my good will -- really, can you make nothing better of your life than THIS? Lazing about in the woods in all weathers, eating the fruits of the king's forest and robbing wayfarers on his highroads for something to occupy yourself... '
> 
> 'I take it you two know each other,' Jenkin said dryly. Possibly the "thou" his brother had been using on him and he in response after the first challenge had given his minion the first clue**.
> 
> 'What, has he never told you of his elder brother George? Tch. Hardly the way to bind followers to your mesnie, my dear whatever-you're-naming-yourself-these-days -- '
> 
> 'You. Know. Quite. Well.'
> 
> 'Yes, you have been making the name for yourself.' At least his brother -- if he was calling himself George, he was almost certainly identifying himself as more than a yeoman, as if his clothes hadn't been enough of a tell; at least he was confining himself to fluent if Midlands-accented English -- was letting the band lead his horse and pack-pony down the side-trail, seemingly utterly indifferent to his abduction as long as he could look down his nose in a big-brotherly fashion. 'I suppose we must count it a mercy that this time you seem to retain enough of your senses to dress yourself -- in woods-colored-clothes, yet -- and speak more or less like a Christian. How long has it been since you stirred one foot outside of this forest -- save for its outskirts, to run one of your raids or pay your auxiliaries in kind?'
> 
> 'We've been moving from wood to wood.' Frustrated, he dropped back into the tongue of their boyhood. _'And I'll have you know that I was in Champagne for a few years, helping a scop, a trouvère*** yet, write poems about the Northwestern Roman Empire -- although if you believed him it all looked very much like the count's court of Champagne transplanted to the old dun of the High Kings of Britain in blithe defiance of Saxon and Anglish raiders and cut supply lines, bedizened with all the heroes of the reborn kingdoms of Britain, half of the heroes of the ancient kingdoms of Britain, and various heroes of Armorica and points eastward, none of whom had anything more pressing to do than wander around in the forest and see if anything interesting and potentially dangerous presented itself -- not even Mother's Armoric Briton heroic identity. Which last I may have fed to Chrétien; I rather think he developed a bit of a man-crush.'_
> 
>  _'Ah, so you were the one responsible for the tale that Mami had had a passionate affair with herself. Himself?'_
> 
>  _'Well, who should I have had him give Mother for a vassal eromenos****? One of the names she still remembers with revulsion? Caius Longus? You?!'_
> 
>  _'... How you managed to not notice all of the ways in which Mami assured that the most contentious local lords would show up to Uncle Caesar's battles on time or stay out of the way of the stylus-pushers... " _ The self-proclaimed George huffed himself more straightly erect. _'Well, at any rate, you're probably right, no need to libel anyone more than one may already be doing or exalt someone who should properly be excoriated, and Mami is the one person who incontrovertibly had access to her own bed. And I rather thought the poems had your tracks all over them, so I made the trouvère in question aware of some of the reports of your own exploits.'_
> 
>  _'You. Did. Not.'_
> 
>  _'I fail to see why you persist in making statements so clearly and obviously contrary to fact; I believe I made quite a good story of your descent onto Calleva with various references to Dondinel's later arrival at Nantes, and your old habit of misunderstanding women badly enough to accidentally plight them your troth, and your utter inability to name yourself properly even if that was by rights much later, and your dealings with the Bran cult and their processions -- although he said it was too cluttered to have both a jewel-encrusted casserole dish and a severed head on a platter, so he left one of them out -- and the witches of Spiral Castle... '_
> 
>  _'They lived in a house in Glow with a labyrinth set into the floor of the hall instead of a rain basin. What about that suggests a castle?'_
> 
>  _'What in the world did they do when it rained?'_
> 
>  _'Oh, there were drains set into the labyrinth here and there.'_
> 
>  _'And I rather think he's been planning to do something interesting with the casserole dish and its mysterious contents... probably that little clay bowl you gave me, as a castle full of wonders and marvels and a feud with witches is rather more interesting to most people than hunting through manuscripts to find hints about where something once was and then going there to dig it up. Even if you're helped out by a prophetic dream, after the fashion of St. Helena.'_
> 
>  _'Prophetic dream.'_ He probably didn't manage to infuse the words with the full disgust they deserved, but at least he tried. _'Whatever did happen to that cup thing?'_
> 
>  _'Oh, I still have it; I wrap it in my socks or use it to keep my buttons in. I've been thinking of giving it to the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and the Temple of Solomon with an artfully crafted provenance; they'll be so very happy and grateful.'_
> 
>  _'And so very much in your debt.'_
> 
>  _'This cynicism is scarcely becoming, mi frater. No wonder the women stop looking at you once you open your mouth a few times; you'll never be able to win a wife with your own devices.'_
> 
>  _'I can court a woman, and win her, and wed her, as soon as I find one who suits me!'_
> 
>  _'Oh, and when will that be? The Greek kalends?'_
> 
>  _'Give me a hundred years, and I'll find her.'_
> 
>  _'Ten.'_
> 
>  _'Eighty.'_
> 
>  _'Twenty.'_
> 
>  _'Fifty.'_
> 
>  _'Done!'_
> 
> Possibly he had just been quite stupid. 'What are you gawking at?' he demanded, whirling on his minions.
> 
> 'You do jabber that Latin as well as any priest,' Jenkin answered, eyes round in feigned wonder. "Why, you might have made the grand clerk had you not been outlawed!'
> 
> 'The laws in these parts are so ridiculous that I'd have to drain half the blood out of my body and replace it with turpentine to begin to understand them; it's almost a duty to live by more sensible ones. And on that head, George, we'll be requiring five silver pennies from you to pay for your share of the feast and our company.'
> 
> 'I wonder how you keep body and soul together, with such scant reaping,' his brother murmured.
> 
> 'It's part of our new policy to encourage our guests to report their burdens fully and honestly. Haven't you been doing as much with the tax rolls?'
> 
> 'Shouldn't we have blindfolded him by now?" the newest recruit interrupted, shifting from foot to foot. "Even if he is your brother, master...'
> 
> 'It's M-- my brother," he quickly corrected himself. "He'll remember the way there and back anyway, which is why we're going to the Table rather than a holt proper.'
> 
> The band were all staring at him now, and he threw up his hands.
> 
> 'Everyone knows about the Table anyway, its one advantage is that it's hard to sneak up on! So no matter who George tells about this -- and no, we're not going to slit his throat and leave him dead in a ditch, he hasn't done anything to deserve it other than twit me about my younger days -- '
> 
> 'I'm thinking of passing your story on to a Welsh bard or two I know, too,' George said thoughtfully. 'Poets serving a high table will keep getting sidetracked with knights and tourneys and courtoisie, and most people would be far more interested in fair maidens throwing themselves at your head and that time you were pledged to three women and obligated to deflower a fourth in order to restore fertility to the land."
> 
> Eight men demanding 'What?!', sadly, did not sound like a massed chorus so much as a confused noise.
> 
> 'If you sow crops on the older battlefields, they're likely to have put life back into the soil,' the man who'd thought he'd lived down his short but eventful career as Peretur grumbled. 'Semipagan ritual bedding ceremonies have nothing to do with it.'
> 
> 'How,' Jenkin hissed, 'did you manage to avoid the fallout?'
> 
> 'Ran off to Constantinople.'
> 
> 'And speaking of which,' George had kneed his horse directly behind him when he hadn't been listening, 'you and your... merry minions might consider removing to another forest in the days to come; the king has it in his mind to appoint this shire a reeve.'
> 
> 'You could not bring more welcome news, brother mine: it's so everlastingly dull here with no one to avoid but the king's foresters. A sheriff will see us some fun, won't he, men?'
> 
> 'Oh, I wash my hands of you!'
> 
> 'Jurisne*`?'

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * _In our world, pancrein wasn't isolated until 1921 and laboratory-synthesized until 1977, by which time it had long been known as "insulin."_
> 
> ** _Professional singer-songwriter called a "scop" (pron. "shop") in Old English, a "skald" in Norse, or a "troubador" in Occitan; the trouvère of Northern France, however, seems to have been one of the first varieties to compose a longer work to manuscript -- if one still meant to be read aloud to an audience, with pauses for them to discuss or MST the work._
> 
> *** _The habit of using the second-person-plural pronoun (Eng. ye, you, your) to a single person to be polite seems to have started in the late Roman Empire and moved outward (although a cursory search can't find anything to tell whether or not it was in use in East Germanic and hit both the Empire and Erminonic from there, and I don't want to spend hours looking when I could be writing): this means that the old second-person singular (Eng. thou, thee, thy) would only be used to people you were close to or people you were acting overly familiar with in order to be insulting. The last use became so widespread in English that it fell out of everyday use in most places, and people were forced to elaborate the old second-person-plural (you) with such descriptors as "worm," "bastard," and "yellow-bellied polecat" in order to be properly offensive._
> 
> **** _Gk._ "beloved," _with an extremely strong connotation of_ "sub" _; the reason Courtly Love was so controversial in its day was that it made the woman the dom, which is downright unnatural to an indoctrinated Aristotelian (whether piped through St Paul or not)._
> 
> *` _Lat._ "do [you, sing.] promise?"


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> He's never been much for burning philosophical questions and less for poesy, and so filed most of his questions of faith into "unanswerable" or "answered" and was done with it.

Sherlock doesn't know why most of the people he meets these latter days tend to assume he's an atheist. He's certainly never spoken to them on the subject. (The last time he brought something of the sort up himself, two of his three listeners fixed him with the sort of looks one gives someone suspected of being under the influence and the other knew him better than he had any right to.)

Guher was born in a time and place where being a Christian was what one did, and raised in an island where it -- or being a poet-philosopher, or both -- was equally de rigeur; he's never been much for burning philosophical questions and less for poesy, and so filed most of his questions of faith into "unanswerable" or "answered" and was done with it.

(In other parts of the island in question, one could find Isians, or Jews, or Mithrans too old or too young to have been marched off with their co-religionists and the rest of the legions, or followers of the ancestral deities that didn't particularly bother with the poetry or the philosophy: but Guher's earliest memories -- aside from some vague ones of a journey by ship and a port, and he's long since forgotten whether the latter had been at the beginning or the end of the former and where he and Mami might have been going at the time -- are of places neither cosmopolitan or backwoods, and his mother and her servants kept him out of the former until he had reached an age potentially of reason.)

So, for that matter, had most of "Peretur's" colleagues; the closest most of them came to questioning the eternal verities was to point out to him that given his hazy grasp of the art of self-preservation, he had much better be baptized at once, rather than wait till his deathbed so as to be forgiven all the sins he was likely to have committed by then. Mami stood godmother to him, welcoming the chance to establish a public relationship; Guher Flowinghair kindly stood godfather and bestowed his own name upon his new godson (thus, fortunately, relieving him of the need to hide his own attention every time someone shouted "Guher!"), which was of a piece with the generous attentions he had shown Peretur ever since the latter turned up with an insatiable curiosity and all the social graces of a boy raised by crippled bears. Sherlock still isn't quite sure what the man got out of it, but for his sake he'd have looked after his godfather's young brother even if the boy hadn't grown up to be Mycroft.

It was probably just as well, as Guher/Peretur Longspear met his First Death (in a silly accident, where he hadn't been more than usually careless, for once) less than a year after said baptism. Although postmortem baptism ought to confer at least something, as Mother for one cannot possibly have been baptized antemortem.

Still, it's generally been enough for Sherlock that he believes; the how and the why of it are far too tedious to examine for long, and his brief foray into the contemplative life only confirmed that for him: in order to manage true Contemplation, one must empty one's mind entirely, or it's like trying to look out the window of a lighted room at night, or see the stars in the heart of London. (Which Sherlock sometimes does, but only because he knows they're there; he tries not to, because seeing things one doesn't actually see is a good way to slip into the habit of seeing things that aren't actually there.) Sherlock's mind is always buzzing like a beehive, and so he long since came to the conclusion that if God had wanted him to quiet his mind and sense the presence of something far greater than himself, He would have given Sherlock a mind capable of being so quieted.

But Sherlock has always, always looked for the reasons and the causes of things. Sound is the ear's reception of air vibrating at a certain amplitude and frequency, but that doesn't explain why sounds in a particular order can sound like music, or why that music should sound good. Flowers attract their pollinators with color and scent, and the pattern of petals has to do with an evolutionary something (boring), and humans tend to find those scents pleasing that smell like either a human interested in mating or something good to eat -- but that doesn't explain why the scent of the rose blossom (which doesn't smell that much like a fruit) should be so pleasing, or why it should be allied to a combination of petal arrangements and colors that humans find beautiful, or why humans should see beauty in a rose in the first place.

Everything has a reason and a meaning, if you can only trace it back and find it out. Even if you don't have all the data that would allow you to trace effects back through their contributory causes to their initial impetus, the primary and secondary and tertiary causes exist. Things such as roses and sonatas and John Watsons don't just happen to happen.


	8. Chapter 8

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Coincidences do happen and their causes can be traced, but they're far more likely not to.

Sherlock isn't stupid. Coincidences do happen and their causes can be traced, but they're far more likely not to. He's never had any interest in finding out how many Wilds or Moriartys or Worths live in the Greater London area, but if an extensive criminal ring is being run by a Moriarty or Worth or Wild, it's far more likely to be by someone who deliberately adopted the name for its reputation rather than someone born with it, whether they learned the reputation from reading the law reports or from the popular -- well, one can't really call it 'fiction' if it's not, and 'novelization' only applies when the resulting retelling is novel-length.

(Now and then, these days, when he needs a bright moment, he pictures the late unlamented Professor Aloysius James Moriarty's likely reaction to learning of the madman wearing his name. It's almost enough to make him lamented: even if success in mathematics can be summed up in the word 'plagiarise' ['only be sure, please, to always call it "research"']* the sheer slapdash and sloppiness of Jim's techniques would likely be at least as excruciating as wanton inattention to grammar, and the Professor's way of dealing with irritations could often enough be summed up in the word 'Moran.')

He suspected when the man (stiff bearing, military? police? Tan skin, paler wrists -- significantly tanned skin -- cane, signs of long-term stress not echoed by physical frailty: more likely military) limped in with Mycroft "Mike"** Stamford (Stamford!) talking about changes at Bart's (medical training: completed y/n? Intermittent limp: coupled with style of cane, small ways of holding himself incompatible with police experience, almost certainly military, quite possibly RAMC) the same day he'd initiated the experiment of bitching to Stamford about his inability to find a flatmate...

Anderson would have been able -- providing, of course, that he were in possession of the relevant data -- to tell it smelled.

And the events of the next day only served to confirm his suspicions, bring him to formulate a hypothesis properly and start finding data (all of which, unsurprisingly, supported it, wrong dominant side notwithstanding). Mycroft even called, sending Sherlock the data he'd gathered so far on one Doctor John Hall Watson (Hall! I ask you!) and assuring him that he had set more extensive investigation in motion.

Sherlock knew then (or, rather, he didn't know, but he had a hypothesis well on its way to being a theory and he'd trusted his head to less in the past and doubtless will in the future), but he was delightfully uncertain about how it was all meant to play out, and he's never had any particular objection to being told that his deductions and inferences are amazing and brilliant while he waits.

(And he wouldn't have admitted it, not then, not when he was _[ought to be]_ in the middle of the life he'd battered into the shape he'd made for himself -- but he was lonely. And had been, for longer than John's been alive.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _* From a song by Tom Lehrer._
> 
>  _** Sherlock's "friend"'s stories were read, as indeed they were in our world, by a young man called Robert Anson Heinlein; but given their respective lapse into oblivion in his world, unlike ours, nobody particularly understood why RAH had named the supercomputer in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress "Mycroft."_


	9. Chapter 9

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "The world is wide enough: no ghosts need apply."

It's hardly true that Sherlock Holmes believes only in what he can see and touch and measure: as with other things, he has deduced invisibles and intangibles from observing their effects and ruling out other possible causes for same. (Or, in some cases, noting that while other possible causes exist for several, assuming a particular intangible fully explains several effects and requires less unprovable assumptions than other explanations, and thus will do as a model and hypothesis to be going on with until such time as it is disproven.) A really competent mind -- and he means really competent, over and above his brother's -- could deduce the presence, not only of an ocean, but of tides, a shoreline, air, the earth, and doubtless a whole planetarium's worth of stars and planets and whatnot going round and round from a single grain of sand.

He believes an Immortal's soul is bound up in their Quickening (and that a soul is different from one's spirit, either of them). He believes in God. He believes that sometimes certain people can foresee events (there is no other good reason as to why enough people predicted the Year of the Pale Sun in an island as far away from the Pacific [wherever on that vast ring the prime cause in question truly might have been] as Britain, unless one starts postulating diabolic or angelic intervention, which in effect should fall under foreseeing anyway), but that it is hardly replicable under study conditions and therefore not worth studying unless it becomes so. He is willing, tentatively, to admit the possibility of ghosts.

He doesn't believe that he can see ghosts himself. Clearly they are hallucinations. Particularly detailed ones, that his competent (if not really competent) mind has created out of his detailed knowledge and Immortal-perfect memories of the people in question while living; obviously enough, it needs said persons' former possessions or parts to trigger an actual hallucination rather than merely a vivid memory.

 _It's a shame someone so bright can be such a fool_ , Clorinda told him once when he was being particularly vociferous about it.

"Yes, it is rather foolish to speak in reply to my own hallucinations, but I fell into the habit of answering you when we were married and have yet to lose it." He dropped his hand into his purse and rubbed his thumb across the familiar knucklebones, beginning to be worn almost as smooth as the skin that covered them had once been.

 _We're not married now?_

"I seem to remember something about 'till death do us part.' And something about 'neither marrying nor giving in marriage.'"

 _You were the one insisting that you've been dead yourself all this time._

"Yes, but you weren't, and we were both in this world and not the next one."

 _I rather forgot how annoying you can be when you're there, given how seldom you were._ The Clorinda he sees is almost as black-haired and smooth-faced as she was when he wooed and won her, but for the moment of her longsuffering sigh she wears every one of her forty-two years.

"Oh, and who told me to run along and play in the green wood rather than -- "

 _\-- be underfoot and miserable all the time? It was the right decision, for you and for me and for the children who didn't understand why they needed to be quiet about you until they knew of something you were doing best kept secret. That doesn't mean it made it any easier to remember you in more than generalities when you weren't on one of your visits; we aren't all graced with your mind._

Which was a pity, especially about the children: their begetter had certainly had his share and more of talents, and it is peculiar (though sadly true) that inheritance is not as simple as an intelligent man having intelligent children.

(On the other hand, had it been so, Sherlock would still feel vaguely guilty about not making an effort to sire multiple lines before his First Death and so improve subsequent humanity.)

He doesn't always hallucinate the ghosts, either; only now and then, usually in situations that bring the people to mind, and often enough they fade in time: Clorinda, for example, he used to see every week after she died, and every other day when he was first meeting and mucking matters up with Marian (his mental Clorinda was greatly amused by the whole saga, and persisted in offering him advice that proved, on the rare occasions when he took it, to be efficacious more often than not), and then less and less often until one day he realized that despite the, ah, token he still carried, he hadn't seen her for months and, outside of memory trances, never had again.

(Some time after that, Marian persuaded him to bury the thing in Clorinda's grave, which he did with the gold wires still on it: it is perfectly ridiculous to assume that she'll have any use for it come the resurrection -- he's fairly certain he remembers a reading in the lectionary every third year at least about seeds and kernels and sown in corruption raised incorruptible, and heaven knows that when he was thrown into a new body he didn't particularly have any use for the old one once he'd finished with any experiments that came to mind -- but Marian heard his arguments out and then repeated her own position, and it was scarcely worth arguing with her AND his student AND his minions AND the distinctly unpenitent friar they'd just acquired.)

Nor does he ever see the ghosts of Immortals, whether he took their Quickening, or not, or slew another Immortal and felt amid the rush of their pseudo-life some faint echoes of a comrade, or a student, or _her (Marian)_ : in the first and last cases he may have some faint or more-than-faint traces of their memories to increase his empathy for them and thus render their memory more tender to his mind, but that mind will never again deceive itself that it sees and hears them, easing the pain of their loss (or just acting as his better angel, as the man always did in life).

Without that -- he knew and loved and kept company with Marian for far longer than he had with Clorinda, and when she was slain, the loss was sudden, unexpected, and complete. Only the fact that she had had a deliberate slayer (one who left behind him his description and the beginnings of a trail) and the hunt for said headhunter kept him from sinking into a melancholia and outright accidie even greater than that Oliver's loss had drowned him in so long ago. And bitter as the trail of retribution was, by the time he finally avenged her and felt bits of Marian's amusement and regret amid her slayer's bitterness and bile, he had somehow fallen back into the habit of living (inappropriate as that word might be to an Immortuus, call him never so immortal) and remembered that he still had a thing or two to prove to his brother, and really couldn't be put to the bother of actively seeking death.

Besides, the survival instinct is strong, and Sherlock Holmes has always had a share and more of that even when his instincts as to how to best preserve his life and health have been nonexistent; or perhaps, in him, it is not a call to survival per se as much as an overriding need to stick around and see what happens next; or even just the result of long hours of training all the way back to Caius Longus and Mother before that, to fight back when attacked and not let his fool self be killed, no matter how attractive the release from tedium might seem during periods of non-combat. Black as his melancholia can be, even it cannot wholly quiet his mind enough to lie down and die.


	10. Chapter 10

Three disgustingly talented people Sherlock has known: Fridiricu II, Stupor Mundi, son and heir of the queen of Sicily and King of the Romans; and Leonardo son of Pietro son of Angelo; and La Carina, born Irene Bridget Adler in Princeton, New Jersey.

But Guher Govan Flowing-hair was more brilliant than all of them; fortunately for his humility, but unfortunately for his comrades, he nevertheless suffered from the delusion that "Falcomagis son of Guherius" was a fitting and unexceptionable alias under which to win a place on his own merits. (Probably it ran in the family.)

 _Sherlock is more amused than he should be that, should he want to name three gifted naturalists he has known, he could s/La Carina/Esteve Maturin i Domonova (also called Stíofan, and answering to said names' Spanish or English equivalents) and the statement would remain just as true._


	11. Chapter 11

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "They'd charged me to find something for them, and when I brought it back they weren't happy with it."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The conversation about Contemplation is inspired by Judith Merkle Riley's A Vision of Light.

_(A long time ago, during one of his brother's rare absences from the Island of Britain, the man whose name wasn't Sherlock yet went seeking him, running him to earth at last in Carisiacum under the name of Gryphon._

 _"You look exhausted," Gryphon said critically, clapping for hot drinks and a warmer fire while he threw a mantle around his brother and pushed him down onto a finely-decorated camp-stool. "What you need is some way to fasten bedding to the sides of a chair and maybe its back so that one can sink into its embrace."_

 _"If that made the back and sides sturdy enough to sit on, it might even be useful." _

_"And drink your posset -- you didn't have to bring it yourself, Gerhard, it's just my brother Guher Longspear. Guher, this is my student Gerhard of Rosceliano, heir to the traditions of the Wis Goths of the Gaulish province, refugee from the Moorish incursions in Narbonnish Gaul, husband of my latest abrogative mother's lord husband's natural sister; he fell at the battle of Tours, and was fortunate enough to be able to pretend to just have been knocked out."_

 _"I think it was closer to Poitiers, actually, my lord Gryphon."_

 _"Tours is shorter, easier to write, and you were between them and the shrine of Saint Martin, which is at Tours; history is written by the monks, now that the days of secular chroniclers are fading into legend."_

 _"Where's Rosceliano, anyway?" Guher didn't particularly care, but it was something to help put off any scolding for failing to drink the posset. He cradled the warm goblet in his hands and inhaled the steam._

 _"The old Ruscino, just this side of the Pyrenees next the Mediterranean, overlooked by Elna, it's the place where -- well, never mind that, it wouldn't have interested you. Gerhard, this scapegrace is my brother through our adoptive mother -- what are you calling yourself these days, Longspear?"_

 _"Haven't your spies told you?" Guher peered at the goblet, then, under his brother's watchful and disapproving eye, took a small sip. It wasn't horrible._

 _"Strangely enough, no, and I shall have words with them -- but not overly harsh words, as it shouldn't have been hard for them to tell that you've been on the road since the ship from Britain landed. I trust you haven't started another war?"_

 _"You needn't keep searching me for your own failings: I'm not even outlawed, although if you asked there are a few high churchmen and a king in Wintanceaster who've taken a pronounced dislike to the name of Percephalus."_

 _" Percephalus?!"_

 _"I was calling myself 'Pencephalus,' but enough people were having trouble pronouncing it that it was simplest just to change over to their version, especially when it implied that I do perceive things."_

 _"You are no longer allowed to name yourself. Ever." Gryphon wagged a thick finger in his brother's face, before spinning to pace in the little room. "Pencephalus. Mary Mother."_

 _"What happened?" Gerhard asked. "Did you die in front of them?"_

 _"Nothing that drastic." Guher Percephalus gestured dismissively with the goblet, barely refraining from slopping posset all over the floor. "They'd charged me to find something for them, and when I brought it back they weren't happy with it."_

 _"Brought what back?"_

 _"Fetch my saddlebag."_

 _Gerhard was already halfway back with it when he seemed to realize his teacher's guest's lack of authority: he looked vaguely from Guher to Gryphon, who had wholly satisfying lines of irritation through his back, before handing the saddlebag to his teacher instead._

 _Gryphon casually drew the bundle in question out from the middle of the saddlebag. "Your footwraps; I suppose we must be thankful that they're at least laundered."_

 _"I didn't have time to wash them." This was interesting; he hadn't consciously noted the lack of stench when pulling things in and out, but he certainly couldn't remember its presence now he cast his mind back either. "It wouldn't seem to have been possible for them to air out in the saddlebag..."_

 _"Quite unlikely." Having untied the knot, Gryphon rapidly unwrapped the someone discolored but dry and soft cloths and revealed a simple pottery deep bowl or wide cup with a chip out of the rim. "It seems in good enough condition for a style that hasn't been made in Britain for some time."_

 _"Hasn't...?"_

 _Really, must his brother keep taking thick students? "The curve, the fingershaping, and that's not a British clay, nor one I've come across on my way here. And it's in very good condition for the centuries I could track; but no, apparently they were expecting gold, or jewels, or something. Since when do the objects they build shrines TO have decorations? The boxes they're kept in, maybe; but if I were taking care of a shrine that might well be overrun by sea-raiders, as this one was, I wouldn't need a tenth of my sense to leave the valuable box out where the raiders might take it and leave after only the obligatory trashing of the shrine and hide the thing I prized somewhere safer. Such as where I found this, for example. I think the only time I've ever seen a venerated object that was decorated itself was that silver-covered spear with the bloody point that the Bran cultists were carrying in procession."_

 _"You didn't mention it was covered with silver," Gryphon remarked. "Entirely or partially?"_

 _"Entirely. Or possibly made of silver save for the point -- I couldn't quite judge the weight then, I haven't seen it since, and that girl, the bride, didn't tell me much herself except that it was allegedly the weapon that struck Bran down and the lance of Longinus. Which last is utterly ridiculous, as it wasn't a lance*, it was a spear for poking people with, you'd have to be a giant or Boduir the Anatomical Model to launch it somewhere, and anyway it wasn't in two pieces the way old Roman lances were."_

 _"It's not impossible that Longinus might have had such a spear, though," his brother pointed out, "as silver spears without a spearhead were traditionally given to First Files on their retirement, should he have made it as far."_

 _"Should have asked about that, too." Guher sighed and absently drank more of his posset. "Never making that mistake again."_

 _"More importantly, you should have asked about timeframe; even though his head must have been buried after Claudius's legions, according to all the stories Bran was High King of Britain before Casswellaun, and Casswellaun held the High King's dun when Julius Caesar was conducting his raid-in-force."_

 _"So?"_

 _"So Christ was born in the reign of Caesar Augustus?" Gerhard was staring at him as Gryphon settled onto a stool and leaned back, content to let his student answer. "And crucified and pierced by Longinus with his lance under Tiberius Caesar? Both of whom reigned after Julius' time?"_

 _"Did they?" Guher blinked at him._

 _"Back when he was fifteen, we could get away with claiming he'd been raised in a cave in the woods and just didn't know any better," Gryphon commented dryly._

 _"All that aside," there's no reason why Gryphon needs to detail his brother's shortcomings to his student in front of Guher, he can perfectly well do it when Guher's been and gone, "the shrine was where its mentions in the old records led me to believe it was if under a large quantity of soil, the vessel was hidden within it, and by all indications this is the same one that had been in the shrine and prior to that in the possession of known keepers since the Christian Jew in question brought it to the Island of Britain and entrusted it and its claims to them. Now, it's always possible that a substitution was effected before it arrived on British shores, but that's quite outside my province; and in any case, as an object of veneration for over four hundred years it should have acquired enough potency to be more than sufficient to bolster his hold on Ine's crown, no matter whether it was or wasn't any or all of the dishes in question."_

 _"Dishes?" Gerhard said._

 _"The records were reasonably good about where the shrine was in relation to Glass Isle: apparently it used to be on the island, but the religious community split -- half got the location with its tumulus and confused thorn-tree, and the rest took the relic and went to their new home, in the middle of absolute nowhere, on a site that was a positive haunt of crows by the time I arrived. Probably why I had the Bran cult in mind, as I haven't seen that many crows in one place outside a battlefield since then and at least the Branites were feeding and breeding them; apparently the ruins make an excellent rookery. But those records refused to come to a clear consensus on whether the item in question had been used to hold the wine at that Passover dinner before the Crucifixion, or the leftover breadcrumbs, or the bitter herbs for all I can tell, or used to catch the effluvia from Longinus thrusting his lance in in the first place, or been, I don't know, shaped out of clay from the ground at Calvary or something..." Guher Percephalus trailed off, conscious as he could not help but be that both Gerhard and Gryphon had ceased to pay him attention, staring instead at the vessel in the latter's hand._

 _"And they rejected it because it was not the lordly chalice of a king, but a cheap pottery affair such as a pack of vagabonds and carles out of work might have picked up to use," Gryphon said at last, his voice soft and bitter and his gaze passing through the 'cheap pottery affair' to focus stades thence. "And this is the heritage of the sons of the ala of the Wissi, whose forefathers won themselves the land of the Wends as well as the Wendishking's daughter and the Thervingsword by the might of their arms, whose ancestors stood faithful to Incgenthius at the Dana-heath and drove the Huns back beyond Mirkwood for a generation or more; who took service under Constantine and settled in the vales of the Tamesis with their Batavian compatriots, leaving Gerhard's ancestors to battle it out among themselves in the absence of the Thervingsword. The heirs and descendants of the county of the Gewissae, whose first prince was governor of the largest province in Britain and hereditary High King of that island: who were the doughtiest troops of the emperors in the West and Northwest, swelling their numbers by mingling with the heirs of Arminius and Claudius Civilis, and yet always owing their loyalty to the Augustus second to that they gave a prince of their own Therving blood, save when the two were one and the same. Who alone acknowledged the last Caesar of the empire in the Northwest when their more purely British cousins failed, who kept themselves alive and intact as the Saxons and the Angles raided deep, and who fought off the Jutes so long and so fiercely that the seacoast bears their failed king's name; who laid aside their claims to empire and the amenities of civilization to preserve their people against the day they might take it up again... and this is what it was all for, the political apostasy of Cunoric's sons and the expedient reconversions of their great-grandsons, to fade to no more than a westernmost Saxon kingdom and fail to recognize logic when it's presented to them as blatantly as you would have, reduced to children chasing after sparkles and miracles."_

 _Guher, for one of the few times in his long life, had no idea what to say. The silence seemed to swell to fill the chamber, and his brother quietly set the cup (or, as it might be, bowl) down on a large press._

 _"Perhaps," Gerhard suggested in tones of conscious facetiousness, "if one were to make it known that the cup has not only been found but has the power to lift the stench from footwraps?"_

 _"Gerhard," his master sighed, "a creation with the power to lift stench from footwraps has long been known to the kingdom of the Gewisse as well as those of the Franks: it's called 'a stream with rocks in it.'"_

 _"You might as well keep it," Guher said ungraciously. "I haven't any particular use for it, and you probably have a better right to it than anyone living there these days. Either there. Or anywhere else I've passed through on the way here -- since when do the Surreymen speak Saxon?"_

 _"Since the early seventh century? Are you sure you haven't been living in a cave in the woods?"_

 _Gerhard blinked. "What else would they speak?"_

 _"Well, they're descended from the Angles who left Cantia and their new Oiscing overlords -- mostly Hengist's grandsons and the like upper brackets," Gryphon clarified, "and of course the remaining local British population, but in between Saxon kingdoms as they are I'm not surprised they too went over to the new manner of speaking. Any more than I am by the way Burgundy's been softening the hard sounds at the end of words like the Lombards and Bavarians."_

 _"Why do they do that, anyway?"_

 _"To frustrate the tax collectors."_

 _Guher laughed._

 _Gryphon pulled a face at him._

 _Gerhard stared. [Apparently he still suffered from the delusion that Guher's brother was the perfect master of his own self. That would change. Guher could almost feel sorry for him, in a detached and charitable sort of way.]_

 _Then he quite visibly was struck with a realization. "Wait, what did he mean, 'have a better right to it'?"_

 _Guher felt his eyes widen without feeling the need to do anything particular about it. "You haven't told him, o mi frater. Haven't you told him anything?"_

 _"I know my lord Gryphon is not the son in body of Lord Karl and Lady Swanachildis, but was adopted by them," Gerhard began [what did he have to be indignant about? Considering the efforts Gryphon had made to obscure his origins and Gerhard's certain lack of experience to compare his master to, it was hardly his fault if he'd learned little enough more than whatever Gryphon had so grudgingly doled out]._

 _"Abrogated," Gryphon corrected. "I was of age at the time."_

 _"And that he is several hundred years old, and like myself, unaging and immortal until such time as someone cuts our head off. And... I'm fairly sure he's spent some time in Britain at some point. And seems to know more about the history of my people than I do: who is Incgenthius?"_

 _"Let me guess," Gryphon muttered. "If it wasn't in the_ Getica _, it didn't happen."_

 _"No, he wasn't, who was he? Did you know him?"_

 _His teacher laughed, suddenly, a polite little affair. [Guher is sure that it would do his brother good to throw back his head and laugh fully now and again, but it's not as if his big brother's likely to listen.] "I'm not that old; Incgenthius was Ermanaricus's father, and he and his father were Wis invited to hold high kingship over the East-goths as well."_

 _Presumably this conveyed something to Gerhard, who thereupon returned to his subject. "And I know the rules of the game that Immortals would play, and had some small skill with a sword already. What else is your lord brother hiding?"_

 _"Oh, no," Guher smirked. "If he hasn't told you already, I don't see why I should spoil the surprise. This is going to be fun."_

 _"I gather," his brother said dryly, "that you mean to stay for some time."_

 _"I might not have before, but on hearing that you consented to let the local warlord abrogate you..."_

 _"I did Swanachildis my lady mother a favor," Gryphon muttered [muttered! This needed to be pursued.] "She was very grateful. And very barren. Not the safest position for the wife of a prince of the land whose concubine has proved doubly fertile."_

 _"Still, isn't the line to the second name of the land rather public?"_

 _"A little more than I'd prefer, but it should self-correct in the future; it's not as if he would ever relegate one hide of his blood-sons' land to me. Even if I could manage it better than either of them. Besides, the name is one matter and the managing of it another, or Karl my lord father would not have the place he does; I'm sure in time they will realize that I am the best adviser they could have."_

 _"I'm not," Gerhard grumbled. "They dismiss you, my lord. Maybe even hate you. But they certainly don't trust you to look out for any interests but your own -- "_

 _"Hardly necessary, in an advisor." Gryphon's tone was placid, dismissive. "All you need is to ensure that his interests align with yours, or keep in mind the ways in which they differ and weigh his advice accordingly. And, as a brother not in the line of succession, my interests can be assumed -- "_

 _"To be in getting yourself into it, do they look to their family history. And they DO."_

 _Guher jumped up out of his chair and spun around._

 _"What on earth -- "_

 _"It's not a feast day," Gryphon cut off his student._

 _"Certainly it is. The Feast of Commemoration of My Brother Falling Into Error. About the human inability to put one's petty first judgments aside in favor of one's own best interests, yet. Call in the Lord of Misrule early, for this surely is a foretaste of the Feast of Fools."_

 _"Who is it," Gerhard wondered, "that says 'Bare is back without brother'?"_

 _"Speaking of which, I'm sure that it would be quite uncharitable for me to leave you open to a concerted attack, even for a match as unequal as this is likely to be: commend me to your foster-parents for further abrogation, and we can call the matter settled."_

 _Gryphon glared at him, clearly failing to appreciate Guher's humble charity in consenting -- volunteering, even! -- to be publicly associated with his brother. "I refuse to ask my foster-parents to draw up a document that couples their names with that of 'Percephalus.'"_

 _"So choose me another name; it's about time I retired this identity anyway."_

 _"Bernard?" Gerhard suggested. "You look like a Bernard."_

 _"Karl my lord father already has a son named Bernhard: the lady Hruodhaid's eldest."_

 _"So now he'll have two," the potential Bernard shrugged. "We can split their attention, and they won't worry as much that I'll be wanting to steal their patrimony once I go into Holy Orders."_

 _"Attaching yourself to the foremost lady in the land and her lord tends to defeat the purpose of hiding quietly in a monastery," Gryphon said patiently. "I wouldn't want you to deny your self-preservative urges for my sake; you so seldom heed them as it is."_

 _"It's not for the sake of Holy Ground." Really. Hiding out gets insufferably tedious very rapidly unless one has something to DO: fortunately, his new endeavour will require enough attention and perseverance that freedom from the attacks of random predators of their own kind will be merely a convenient gratuity. "I have decided to take up Contemplation."_

 _"Isn't that what you've been doing every time you track something?"_

 _"Oh, contemplation writ minuscule." Guher-turned-Bernard dismissed it with a wave of his goblet. "Anyone can do that if only they stop for a moment and use the mind God bestowed upon them, even if they have no more observations to reflect on than a newborn kitten. No, I speak of the true Contemplation, writ large and perhaps in rubric -- "_

 _"You wish to see God," Gerhard breathed, with a flick of his eyes toward -- really, it was ridiculous, that had nothing to do with the case, except perhaps that dealing with certain churchmen who'd been expecting a gold-and-glass krater or the like had confirmed his opinion that the Church among the Saxons -- and in most of the rest of Britain, for that matter -- had long since ceased looking to spiritual gifts when selecting for advancement._

 _[Not that they had ever depended solely upon it -- certainly the ability to tell people what to do so that they did it and were happy enough to do so, which had never in his life come easily to Guher and seldom enough at all, was of greater importance to the smooth workings of a hierarchy or even an isolated ecclesia -- but there was a time when they chose for talent and holiness, and often enough intelligence into the bargain: Gildas, for instance, back when he was following "Peretur" around like a confused duckling had followed Peretur's explanations better than anyone save the sons of Mother's husband's younger sister, and Dewi had been able not only to chop theology with the finest but to wash off a leek so that all the dirt was cleaned out, even that that had gotten down in between its layers._

(Sherlock STILL doesn't know how he managed to do that.) _]_

 _"Doesn't one need to humble oneself in order to see God?" Gryphon said, clearly taken aback by the magnitude of the quest whose call his brother had heeded. "I have doubts that your neck even bends that way."_

 _"I am extremely humble," Bernard nobly corrected his once and future brother. "In fact, do you measure Humility by the comparative wretchedness and ignorance of those among whom you choose to pass your days and seek to improve, I am quite possibly the humblest man in all the former domains of the Romans, or at least in their northwestern provinces. When you add to that my many hours of toil digging in the dirt, I grow in Humility by leaps and bounds, which should only increase with the spiritual exercises demanded by a monastic life and the hours of prayer I intend to devote to the souls of those dead untimely and the good of your soul and that of our mother. As a matter of fact, I expect to behold God quite soon."_

 _Gryphon opened his mouth and closed it silently twice. It was extremely gratifying._

 _He then hastily turned his back, clearly unwilling to let Bernard see the awe and respect that he undoubtedly was not fully able to keep from reaching his face._

 _Gerhard, meanwhile, had looked desperately from his master to Bernard before clapping his hands to his face and shaking._

 _Could Bernard really have moved him to *tears*? He didn't know much about the Mediterranean Wis-goth character; it could be possible, or perhaps in his surprise he had swallowed phlegm wrong and was now choking. In which case maybe Bernard should do something to help him._

 _"I -- I don't think -- " Gerhard managed at last, wobbly voice liquid enough to reassure Bernard that he needn't leave his chair._

 _"That is all too evident," Gryphon cut him off, voice only quavering slightly. "Longspear. Bernard, if you insist. I do believe I know of an abbot or three who really deserve you for a postulant, and would be delighted and honored to accept the son of Swanachildis the princess. Even an abrogated and hitherto unknown son. And I'm sure Karl my lord father will agree, knowing the abbots in question as he does."_

 _"He at least heeds your counsel and advice," Gerhard agreed, throwing wide his hands and revealing a face whose earlier rapture had been replaced by sourness. "Unlike your lord brothers."_

 _"It's our fraternal duty to keep him from getting above himself and thus help him to attain his own Humility," Bernard declaimed. "In time their children may be humbled themselves by the realization that Gryphon is always better informed and more perceptive than you are, and thus the very person to advise you on any little matters that may have slipped your mind, generally at the most inconvenient time possible. Although he'll scarcely be able to still name himself their uncle in the world's sight once they're grown." He yawned hugely, turning his head back to his brother. "You'll have to call yourself 'nobody,' so that when the lords of the Franks ask young whatever-their-names-are whom they're planning to consult about some matter, the princes can say 'Oh, nobody,' and then do it."_

 _"Now I know you're exhausted," Gryphon remarked, turning back to his brother. "You're ceasing to make sense."_

 _"What was... in that posset...?"_

 _"Soothing herbs and warm milk, nothing that would have worked on you had you not burned your lamp down to the bowl. Come on, brother Bernard, up you go...")_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> *A _lance_ originally was the sort of light spear one _launched_. The Roman variety came in two pieces (in order to fall apart on impact); possibly because late heavy cavalry spears looked something like a Roman pilum, they too came to be called 'lances,' JUST TO CONFUSE PEOPLE.


	12. Chapter 12

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Watchers first identified Sherlock as an Immortal in 1893.

The Watchers first identified Sherlock as an Immortal in 1893, after he won a Challenge that he couldn't easily have avoided without risking some delicate experiments he had going: a swordfight, after all, generally takes up less time than a study of when an Immortal body will shut down high-production healing and go into its maintenance mode.

He knew as soon as they did, of course. He could easily have lost them again (if at the price of having to abandon his research and start again somewhere else), been just one more random Immortal to dot the records and be tentatively suggested as a match for one pattern or another.

But if they didn't need to suspect him, because they already knew him for what he was -- he could go home. He could have his life back.

It was, actually, the third thought to go through his mind, right after "so that's what I was doing that lost decade" (deductions and secondhand reports are all very well, but there's nothing quite like the flashbacks triggered in Immortals by a) the occasional pattern-matching b) a sudden burst of spiritual energy c) a sudden rush of cocaine d) a useful sort of meditation practiced by mortal monks in Tibet to extend awareness of emptiness and bring memories of previous lives hazily into consciousness, but that on Immortals acts rather like opening the door to a grossly overstuffed cupboard) and "and I told my brother 'don't bother, I'm sure he's mourned me and got on with his life'; neither he nor they would ever forgive me if they knew, and even if I somehow could resume everything else, I'd know for the rest of it that I had once more destroyed the best thing in it through carelessness and inattentiveness": the realization that he could resume the career if not the official goodwill he had built up, once more take on clients if in a different set of rooms whose landlady he had not irretrievably outraged, use the skills he had practiced and honed even if he would now inevitably be concious of the hole beside and behind him shaped like the man who deserved the opportunity to castigate and reject Sherlock.

Granted, he'd need some sort of suitably theatric explanation for the general public, but by the greatest of good fortune and the grace of the source of all good, he happened to know someone who made romance at short notice a specialty, and who might, for the sake of what once had been between them, do him one or two last favors if appealed to in person before returning to the exalted heights which his pragmatism had won him.

(It had been all very well for Sherlock to pour his energies, temporarily denied an outlet in the "hurry up and wait" of tracing the skeleton of an organization buried in the solid mire of the Empire's greatest city, into attempting to make an artificial version of a substance he'd had to isolate in order to determine its formula, but it took a medical man or two [doubtless over-alive to any distraction from the melancholy task of going through a dead man's possessions and organizing any papers that had escaped the flames] to realize that even were one yet to synthesize something resembling it, if one had at least managed to isolate pancrein, one might as well isolate a large quantity of it and inject it into the veins of persons suffering from its lack to tide them over until the synthesis was at last achieved. And if Sherlock knew little enough to the discredit of the second man, his ungracious and unasked-for implied consent "oh, very well, you may have some 'normal friends' as well" rewarded with the realization that all the oculist wanted in return for his friendship was someone to look over his tales and romances and occasionally collaborate with, he knew very well that no man in England could deserve a knighthood more than the first one.)

Although in retrospect, making that personal appeal in the form of a Grand Revelation of "hey presto, I'm alive!" had perhaps been suboptimal.


	13. Chapter 13

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock and tedium have never mixed well, even when it wasn't at least partly Mycroft's fault.

When Sherlock falls into a truly black mood, the mere presence of more and different things to do than ever before does little to inspire him to get up and do them. The walls seem to loom over him, menacing (although shooting interesting patterns into them helps); even experiments fail to hold his interest, and often enough he can barely remember to put them in the refrigerator until such time as he once more can muster enough interest to document them.

But, as mentioned before, when the accidie does begin its slow lifting in the lack of a case to burn it away, there are a great many time-devourers available to him. He can play his violin. He can play his good violin. He can run off another costume or five, replace the shirt that got stained with acid, make John a decent suit for once even if he has yet to think of a successful way to present it to him (wonderful invention, the sewing machine; straight seams were always the most tedious and time-consuming part of his several careers as a tailor); maybe if he started off with an overcoat? John seems to like his, after all.

He can crack into the feeds for one or many security cameras all over London and watch people and streets without ever leaving his own flat. The agony columns are largely a thing of the past, but people are prone to be even more indiscreet on their own blogs. He can agree to host the next "film night" with Mrs Hudson and John and Sarah and Molly, or try to ascertain precisely how the last two persons came to be added to their regular audience (he was there for every step of it, it cannot be THAT hard). Wikipedia tends to get all snippy about lack of citations, but he can go hunting for said citations (or cite himself, which simplifies matters when possible) or log into the Watcher database -- either to find reports to so cite (they haven't noticed yet; Mycroft has, but he finds it all very amusing) or just to note events of interest in the lives of past acquaintances, or look himself up, or read the electronic letters the Watchers send each other.

It is from that last that he learns that they have named it the Lestrade Exemption after his first Watcher: not arresting an Immortal when the grounds are at least reasonable is just as much interference as deliberately seeking their arrest, and a violation of professional conduct save when tertiary factors are at play. Watchers in law enforcement, therefore, while generally only moving to arrest Immortals for dueling when third parties know enough that to fail to do so would be noted and marked, and leaving questions of false identies unasked, are no longer held accountable by their fellow-Watchers for arresting said Immortals for other felonies, peacebreaking, erratic operation of a motor-car, and so forth.

(Sherlock is perfectly well able to drive a car. It is entirely a matter of observation, reflexes, and thinking three steps ahead in the case of any possible movement by other vehicles, pedestrians, or animals. Just because certain other parties are incapable of driving faster than thirty-five miles an hour or shifting gears without grinding them is no reason to malign his skills.)

It is also there that he finally learns the reception the Watchers had had from the first man they'd asked to report on his life: who, while more than qualified to watch and record -- although the man had stated his worries about the potential misuse of certain information were it conveyed promptly -- had indignantly responded to the "never interfere" portion of the Watchers' mission statement that, if he would otherwise be required to stand aside when bloodthirsty assassins sought his friend's head, the Watchers could perfectly well wait until said friend raised his ban on publication and buy copies of the _Strand_ or _Collier's_ piecemeal like everyone else.

(Mycroft hadn't been overly pleased about the existence of such detailed records or the publication of certain carefully selected and disguised excerpts from them, but he knew that they had not only both been on the spot for the Lighthouse Incident but that Sherlock had gleefully conveyed to his, er, friend the details of Mycroft's short but eventful Caribbean post-servitude/pre-gubernatorial piratical career [several of which the man had had published, first as a serialized novel and then producing a new short story whenever Mycroft started throwing his then-not-inconsiderable weight too freely around], both of which might almost have been the doing of some benevolent power expressly to provide entertainment and ammunition for the little brother of an overbearing big one. So far, he's confined his actions to quashing their republication, aided by the fact that people stopped being interested in ratocination, after the Great War preferring "detective" novels in which cunning deathtraps and personal intuition were substituted for crime scene observation.

[Or perhaps Mycroft's encouraged humans to be even more sheep than they usually are in this respect. Sherlock really wouldn't put it past him.])

At least a case usually presents enough interest to get him going again, even if once more he has to walk allegedly intelligent technicians and detectives through every little detail. Surely SOME of it should be rubbing off by now?

Of course, the one bright side of not having put himself out of a job again is that the police do bring him the somewhat-more-difficult and therefore interesting cases for consultation. But still. If they could manage to be more efficient about things, and certain criminal elements knew that they were and settled for getting trickier about things rather than do the intelligent thing and find some other way of making a living, he might actually see some interesting puzzles sometime this decade.

Or not -- in which case, when he found some other part of the world to illuminate and investigate, he would do so with the comforting knowledge that London was not full of metropolitan police being egregiously stupid. (As it is, he wonders how anyone ever sleeps through the night. Gross stupidity always keeps him up and puts him off his food. And it's just so DULL.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In our world, the said post-servitude/pre-gubernatorial adventures were published somewhat later in a different format, and written by Rafael Sabatini rather than John H. Watson.


	14. Chapter 14

Sherlock has, of course, had sex in his centuries of existence. Given the length of same, it would be far more remarkable had he not, although he once met an Immortal who had remained virginal and chaste for three hundred years and had every intention of staying that way for at least three hundred more.

He has, occasionally if rarely, felt flashes of desire for another human being; it's all very distracting, but fortunately it usually goes away again, or can be helped to go away when faced with an object of really absorbing interest.

In the absence of conscious desire, if there is a similar absence of revulsion enough physical stimulation will generally leave him in a condition to perform, if not superlatively, adequately enough for the required purpose. It was in such a manner that he first lost what is so commonly referred to as his carnal innocence, back before his First Death, with a young woman who claimed to know him as a blood heir to her forefathers and thus if correct was his cousin (or even sister: even at the time, Peretur was aware that he ought to feel a revulsion for the idea of lying down with his begetter's get. But there was a puzzle to be solved and he hadn't really met the lady before [it wasn't as if he was being asked to debauch his mother, or one of the people he'd been watching grow up] and she was both eager enough to sacrifice her maiden's blood to the land's healing and apparently free from even the idle thought that he might be her brother rather than her cousin, and so he put it out of his head and hasn't thought of it since).

The whole thing was pleasant enough for him at least, if hardly such a wonderful experience that he felt a need to actively go looking for another opportunity; and so carnal matters have generally remained for him. Even the times he's fallen in love, although his desires to learn everything possible about the beloved generally include "how said beloved looks and sounds when reaching completion," his methods of inducing said completion tend to remain more clinical than not. Nor can Sherlock -- well, scarcely ever -- quiet his mind enough to actually spill his seed in the presence of someone he doesn't trust: he's never trusted that many people, either, even if their set is larger than but neither encompassing nor totally separate from the set of people he's been in love with.

On the other hand, the only person he both trusts and actively feels revulsion for the idea of spilling his seed with is his mother, and he would, anyway, if she asked it of him, she's _Mother_... but she's never asked it, and he's just as happy that the thought never seems once to have crossed her mind, despite the peculiar boundary-blurring of most long-term interImmortal relationships.

He has the impression, though, that she's been expecting his brother to sleep with him for over a millennium, which -- Mycroft's never asked it of him, almost certainly knows that Sherlock would willingly fulfill such a request (and gleefully tease his brother about it until one of them died the True Death or the world perished in fire and ice, whichever came first), and very likely has no more actual desire to know his brother carnally as well as far too well in every other way than Sherlock usually has to engage in any carnal matters. Probably. Tracks and spoor and the state of clothing are easy enough to read, but feelings and arbitrary rules about social converse and the many tiny little movements of muscles that underlie the face are far more difficult, even in those people less skilled at mastering themselves than his family: it's complicated and dull, dull, dull and he doesn't navigate them enough to have driven them into his head regardless. By the same token, while in their more antagonistic encounters he has induced from something he can't consciously identify that he and his brother appear to be subtly daring each other to see who will back down first from a Rubicon neither particularly wants to cross, he isn't actually sure that that's what's going on, he's hardly going to ask Mycroft and risk appearing the utter fool, and most of the acquaintances and friends and friends-and he's had that know his brother have either been far too unobservant to notice it themselves, or far too polite to actually mention it much less ask for him, or have known them when the brothers were actually in reasonable charity with each other and thus rendered the whole question moot.

(Sherlock rather hopes John will ask: John's shown himself more than perspicacious for matters dealing with people and manners and all that claptrap, persistent in the search for answers [particularly about Sherlock], and has no respect whatsoever for Mycroft himself. Besides, if John does find out, he might then tell whether he and Sherlock are playing a similar game: Sherlock doesn't particularly care either way [in either case], but he'd really just like to KNOW.)

His own flashes of desire, for that matter, are rare enough that the only times he felt one for someone whom he trusted and loved and was in love with, it was for Marian -- and given that he dwelt with the woman for nigh two hundred years, it would have been more astonishing had he never felt one such.

Otherwise -- while Marian at least asked no more of a leman than he'd been eager to give (and hadn't particularly wanted more than he'd been willing to try), he's made an effort over the years for those souls who were worth it, and been perfectly willing to let them have him or scratch that particular itch elsewhere -- always provided, of course, that they were ready to drop everything and come with him or do his bidding when he called them.

He's known how this whole friendship thing works since before his First Death, after all. Friends spend time with you and enter into your interests and do what you want them to do, and in return you let them have what they want of you and/or your possessions (unless they want more than their company is worth, in which case you end the friendship). Unless they're friends-and, in which case their side of the equation seems to be made up mostly of intangibles (much as one can either give a bowl of oil in return for a coin, or pour it into a lamp and set it afire in return for light and warmth; both Newton's rules and Einstein's were mere codifications and proper proportions for concepts he himself had induced long before): friends-and-relations (including spiritual ones, such as godfathers, and adoptive ones), friends-and-disciples (who are repaid with learning), friends-and-comrades, friends-and-colleagues.

(Will asked once if friends-and-lovers counted as friends-and, but that's ridiculous. Eros and philia are both subsets of agape/caritas, his mother taught him long ago [technically, storge is too, but storge is its own repayment, it is an ancient device written into the bones of men and beasts long ago to ensure that adults stay around and raise and train children who often enough will not even be able to bury them in recompense, and to act as a counterforce to the resentments Cain had of Abel so that brothers will band together against strangers and be happy enough to see their bloodline continue even when not directly from their own loins: in immortals, these family yearnings usually translate into either adoptive kin or student-teacher relationships and thus make those their own recompense]; eros asks more and thus must return more, so that lovers are more likely to demand and receive carnal satisfaction in addition to possessions, while friends will often enough be satisfied with smaller gifts or patronage or even intellectual challenges.

His student had clearly been saddened by his answer, but really, at his age it was best to learn how the world worked before he came to grief through innocence. [He has never understood why people seem to value ignorance so highly. Gildas said once that the Original Sin was not in wanting to know more but in taking without asking and in presuming, in the absence of knowledge, to nevertheless know better than God; Sherlock himself, while often enough underestimating women on Aristotelian lines or that of his observations of what women of a certain class were trained to value and dissimulate, has never blamed them for the sin of Eve -- he himself would have eaten that fruit twice as quickly had his mother or brother or Heavenly Father specifically told him not to, and he prides himself on not being a hypocrite. (Granted, Dewi had promptly contradicted his younger fellow and stated that, as she hadn't known any better at the time, the sin of Eve was mere arrant stupidity, and that the Original Sin was that of trying to evade responsibility once they DID know better; at least Sherlock has never been in the habit of blaming his own failings on anyone else, save for Mycroft when he deserves it.)])

If what one's friend wants is one's wife -- well, after what his mother had gone through, and his godfather's stories of how to win a woman, even without hearing the plaints of all the women he has he'd have known that the only proper response to that is to go and see what one's wife wants, and to choose her over one's friend if necessary, as one promised when entering into that honorable state of contract.

If what one's wife wants is a) more frequent carnal satisfaction than one has time or energy to give her without compromising one's studies, and b) children (which, of course, no dead man walking can give her, not without the grace of some higher power) then provided c) she has no particular objection to one's friend, it can all work out very nicely once the two of them are persuaded not to stand about having long conversations and leaving one out of them.

> _'Most scholars,' Fridiricu had said once, bemused, 'would not confine their remarks on discovering their wife in another man's bed to telling her to throw some garments on, they need someone to hold the light.'_
> 
>  _'"Discover" implies that I was unobservant enough not to look for her first with you, Majesty -- '_
> 
>  _'And you are hardly that -- but I would have expected you, Master Aurelius, to have observed that those who know and consent to their horns pretend not to notice them.'_
> 
>  _'Dull.' The man currently answering to Aurelius tossed his head, shaking some of the long locks (perhaps he should trim them soon) out of his face. 'Moreover, the light won't hold itself and I need both my hands; come along if you like, this should be interesting.' He bent to pick up a stray stocking._
> 
>  _'Come with us, your Majesty,' Chloris (who had been born Clorinda in the north of England nearly two decades before) corrected, taking the stocking from his hand. Titles. Dull and time-consuming._
> 
>  _Fridiricu tossed back the bedclothes and slid out. 'Nevertheless, even those in minor enough orders to marry do tend -- when they aren't whining about the amounts that will reconcile whatever it is this time, I swear Moses and Christ and Muhammad between them have inspired and attracted more frauds than any other three single men in Creation -- do tend to bring up the Commandments in like situations.'_
> 
>  _'We did explain, the time your Majesty helped me lift the beam off him.' Chloris held up Fridiricu's gown for him to put his arms into._
> 
>  _'I'm dead,' Aurelius clarified. 'It doesn't count as adultery when the third party is dead. She could even marry again, if she likes -- although I wish you wouldn't.'_
> 
>  _'Rob,' Chloris answered him, dropping her hands and leaving Frederick to do up his own ties. 'Robin. Robert Aurelius, my dear love, the king of the Romans -- or any king -- does not go about marrying even the Queen of the shepherds. I believe his Majesty has an heiress in mind -- I hope your Majesty doesn't mind me saying as much, your Majesty knows he'd notice as soon as the negotiations started in earnest.'_
> 
>  _That actually hadn't been what he'd meant, but he pointed out 'In the past there have been several kings that did, if of less widespread realms' anyway, raising his voice towards the end over Fridiricu's 'But I don't think you are dead._
> 
>  _'You walk about,' the king of the Romans amplified, 'and breathe, and eat -- or do you not digest your food as other men do?'_
> 
>  _'I certainly seem to, but I haven't really been able to make a proper record the times I cut myself open; either a wound that severe drove my muscles into spasms too great for taking legible notes, or my nerves into shock and made all my observations suspect, or the drugs that quieted the spasms rendered my hand or my mind unusable. Really, what I need is someone else to stand around and take notes and perhaps draw pictures of the contents of my viscera.'_
> 
>  _'Do you suppose that digestion would change depending on your activities? Because I've been wondering whether someone who runs about after a meal digests food more or less rapidly than one who sleeps, and if there were someone who would heal of the videndisectio* I could make sure that the activity was the only difference between the cases -- of course, I'd find you some poppy juice beforehand, and discount its effects from the most recent bit of digestion -- '_
> 
>  _'No, don't do that,' Robert Aurelius protested. 'Then I wouldn't be able to feel it, and it's not as if it'll matter how violently my hands are trembling as long as you're the one writing the descriptions.' He took hold of the side of the window and slung one leg over the sill._
> 
>  _'No,' Chloris broke into the spate of natural-philosophic experimental glee. 'I am not climbing out the hareem window and scaling the wall when the room is equipped with a perfectly good door and the king's majesty is enough of an explanation for my presence or yours. There IS no excuse for clambering up and down walls at night when it would be safe enough to go out the doors like a Christian."_
> 
>  _"Or, better yet, like a Saracen,' Fridiricu pointed out, opening the door in question. 'Most of the ones I've met have been rather more sensible. For that matter, the dead are supposed to be wiser than the living, which tends to argue that you are, in fact, alive.'_
> 
>  _'Wounds don't take,' Aurelius pointed out. 'Often enough death doesn't take. I haven't got older since I first died. Clearly, I am dead and animated by some unknown yet earthly force.'_
> 
>  _'And yet you heal. I have never yet, in all my life, seen a corpse whose wounds healed. It would seem that you are alive, but somehow... frozen.'_
> 
>  _The three of them passed a pair of guards, who straightened to attention and then performed a spectacular doubletake at the sight of Master Aurelius._
> 
>  _'He's welcome enough,' the king told them, 'but you should have seen him enter.'_
> 
>  _'We saw nothing!'_
> 
>  _'That is what you may expect to see when I slip into a building.'_
> 
>  _'Not. Helping,' Chloris hissed at her husband._
> 
>  _Fridiricu, clearly uncertain whether to burst into rage or laughter, compromised by splitting a dirty look between Master Aurelius and the hapless guards._
> 
>  _'There's a method my mother taught me,' Aurelius went on once the latter were out of earshot, 'of raising a suitably unbattered or holed corpse to be an undead servant; it doesn't always work, of course, and when it does work they're free from earthly desires -- but they do eat, if only raw flesh, and they do heal, if far more slowly than the living. Clearly my own kind are merely carrying a particularly potent fire with us, in the same way one might carry a gift for composition or an indwelling moral compass.'_
> 
>  _'Don't most people have a moral compass?' Chloris wondered._
> 
>  _'Generally, they have to learn.'_
> 
>  _'If you know how to do this,' Fridiricu wondered, 'why aren't we overrun with the undead?'_
> 
>  _'I believe I just mentioned that it doesn't always work. And the corpse has to be relatively intact and free from any rot -- sickness or suffocation's usually best. And most mortals have a perfectly unreasonable prejudice against undead of any stripe -- they start waving around axes and torches and it all rather goes downhill from there.' He looked at his companions thoughtfully. 'Although I could try and do as much for you when the days of your life are over...'_
> 
>  _'I intend to live to be old and grey,' his wife contradicted, 'and I have no desire to put off my entry into Paradise for long years only to spend those years here, in this sinful world, old and grey and unable to enjoy any of the luxuries of this world or the pleasures of the next. No thank you.'_
> 
>  _'And the last thing I need is one more reason for Christ's self-proclaimed Vicar on Earth and his loyal clerks to try to block everything I do; besides, without good food and fine wine and complaisant women and family to look out for, what's the point? Everything else is supposed to be available to the blessed anyway. But I appreciate your intentions. Now, what is it that we're holding this light for?'_

Sherlock isn't sure yet what John will want in return. But John follows along and sees Sherlock at his worst as well as his best and still claims his reasoning is amazing; and John buys milk and works around Sherlock's experiments and makes tea; and John is smart, if not a truly outstanding mind, and John remembers to be kind when Sherlock's caught up in something, and whatever he's up to -- for with that elaborate a presentation, he's clearly up to something \-- so far he's only ever pushed Sherlock to be better, to want to be a better person.

Sherlock hasn't bothered to want to be a better person since 8:25:37 in the evening of the eleventh of April, 1952, and he's still not "qualis era[t] bonae sub regno Cynarae" -- or even under Marian's, for that matter -- but John, or the John that whoever it is is pretending to be, makes him want to try, and for that he can have anything Sherlock can give him with a clear conscience and most of what he can give him with a cloudy one (it would hardly be the first time he's compounded a felony; people he doesn't actually know are mostly only interesting for puzzles anyway; if all John wants is to be able to make Sherlock beg, it's been centuries since he worked on his Humility and it'll probably be good for him, certainly less bitter than a John-shaped hole).

 _I don't know whether to be sorrier that you don't trust him to be real or that you're lonely enough to trust him anyway_ , the man says, leaning against the mantelpiece and resting his hand atop the correspondence around the ice pick holding it in place.

"It's not your fault you were too old to be raised," Sherlock answers him, absently plucking at the strings of his violin (the general-practice one, not the Stradivarius). "I don't think anyone who's died of old age has ever become Immortal, either. And he's not you."

 _Neither was my godson, and you liked him well enough._

"He was so... hapless. And so very well-intentioned. Practically no use to my work at all, but he grew on one, like mold on a tin of jam when one leaves it open on the sideboard and forgets about it for a few weeks. John's hardly hapless."

 _No,_ the corners of the man's smile disappear into the dark bush of his moustache, _he isn't, is he?_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> * _vivendisectio:_ Lat. neolog. _"cutting in order to have a look-see."_


	15. Chapter 15

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The first time he died, it was an accident. Well, for certain values of the word "accident."

The first time he died, back when he was Peretur, it was an accident.

Well, for certain values of the word "accident."

He hadn't meant to be abducted by reivers and carried across the North Sea: he'd been trying to find a way to ride home that didn't involve going through a freshly-plowed old battlefield and being greeted as a savior by people who seemed to think he'd done something amazing by letting his phallus be stiffened enough to widen a preexisting gap in a thin membrane (after she'd accidentally kneed him in the eye, but they hadn't asked about that and he didn't see any reason to inform them) and then spilling his seed beyond said membrane rather than all over the girl's thighs, despite the obvious fact that hundreds if not thousands of young men managed as much every day; wondering whether said insemination was really all there were to it, as from everything everyone ever said about such coitus and their actions they certainly seemed to find it far more profound than a pleasant but largely uninteresting enterprise; and wondering how to go about testing whether one of the girl's fellow-cultists had been right in claiming that he, Peretur (Guher), had been born to one of Mami's husband's older half-sisters (the man was extraordinarily well supplied with them, at least one of which had disappeared a year or two before Guher was born), should he decide that he wanted to do so -- hardly relevant to his current existence, after all -- when an oar had hit him over the head.

He hadn't meant to irritate the reivers so much that they sold him on as a thrall to the local sodality of Immortals (all three of them), none of whom seemed to know much of anything about their condition -- and how they'd managed to last as long as they had without running into any teacher or learning decapitation to be rather permanently fatal and battling on Holy Ground to be highly contraindicated Sherlock still isn't sure, although he suspects their never having been farther out of the Cimbric Chersonese than Lower Saxony had had more than a little to do with it. He hadn't meant to irritate the Immortals with his perfectly sincere attempts to teach them elementary postmortem rules and customs, at least not enough for them to decide that he would make wonderful bait for the water monster they had thus far utterly failed to kill. (And speaking of which, who had ever heard of water monsters in the lands of the Northmen anyway?* Even the great flood six hundred years back had only waterlogged enough of the fields that the locals had cast lots for who got to stay and eat the remainder of the harvest and who ought to beat feet as soon as possible for higher and dryer land, numbers swelling with pioneers and extra sons as they went.)

He had, granted, meant for his temporary owners to fill the water monster's cave with strong-smelling smoke, to himself cut his bonds and use them to strangle the water monster (which from the tracks he had realized to be some sort of troglodyte of manlike stock) should he be unable to retrieve one or another of the weapons the sodality of idiots had lost in one set or another of dying throes. He hadn't meant for them to be quite so enthusiastic about the smoke, and he'd utterly failed to anticipate how tough the troglodyte's hide would be (although he had managed, from the sound alone, to calculate the creature's leap in time to get the boar-spear up and braced so that momentum and its own weight drove the blade farther into its body than he could have managed by himself).

But he really hadn't meant to be under the water monster when it gave up the ghost or within reach of its dying throes at all -- since when, he would like to know, have anthropoid water monsters been equipped with sharp whip-quick tails? -- and while he doesn't know whether the tail-blow or one of the other wounds were fatal, or whether his death was due to his crushing by the monster's corpse or even just too much smoke for him to survive his other injuries, in all of those cases it was clearly unintentional, and he hadn't even realized until he woke up with a corpse pinning him down and a rather peculiar sensation of being watched from the cavemouth that, when he managed to throw the corpse off of himself in a burst of adrenalin, resolved itself into three separate but close vectors.

(Other so-called Immortals have described it as a "buzzing sensation," but nothing about it _buzzes_ to him. It's more a combination of the feeling of being watched and of the sort of heightened awareness he feels when he has "caught the scent," to borrow a metaphor, of whatever he's following the traces of THIS time -- in a way that's slightly different from the way it feels to actually be watched while riding the elation of being on the right track.)

 _At the time, after the first unexpected and unpleasant rush of what he hadn't yet known to call adrenalin had had him flinging the corpse off and rolling clear in what he would not even to himself call a panic, he was reasonably sure of what had happened even before the first of the idiots poked his head into the mouth of the cave and said "There's something..."_

 _Peretur managed to get himself on his feet, hobble to the entrance, and deflect the idiot's nervous spear-thrust with one arm._

 _"He's survived," the second idiot said blankly as Peretur reached the cave's mouth, set his back against the stone, and relaxed with all three idiots in vision, "and he feels like us."_

 _"I've killed your water monster," Peretur said acidly. "You needn't all thank me at once."_

 _"Is that its blood?" the third idiot asked, wide-eyed, leaping to catch him as his knees suddenly buckled._

 _Peretur nodded, curling his lip (other inhabitants of this particular peninsula, unlike these clowns, at least understood the concept of a bathhouse)._

 _"That explains it," his support induced from two non-data and another datum the wrong way round. "The Creature bled on all of us! Its blood gave us this immortality, just like Sigwarthaz Fafnisbane!"_

 _"It was a largely man-shaped creature, not a lindworm or any other sort of dragon -- " (and thank the mercy of heaven for that, he's always hated all kinds of worms, even when Guher was a boy he hated seeing naked earthworms wriggle -- even when his mother taught him to fish he'd finally trapped flies and tied them onto his hook somehow rather than pick up a worm and thread it on a hook -- and snakes are worse, all scaled and coiled and hissing, and vipers worst of all) --_

 _"But it can't be complete immortality," Idiot One interrupted, "because Sigwarthaz died when his wife's kinsman stabbed him in the back."_

 _"I thought he died in a wrestling match with Gotthormaz the Wer-Wolf where they both slew each other," the second idiot contradicted._

 _"Maybe Gotthormaz was the wife's kinsman? I think she had something to do with it..." Idiot Three had offered._

 _"Oh, Body of CHRIST," Peretur swore, and treated them to a lecture on the differences between Sigwarth (he barely remembered to add the -az for their benefit, not trusting them to recognize the original Isquaish** version of the name) Wormslayer, grandson of Wols the Young and like him king in Salland, and his own grandson Sigfrith(az) Wormslayer; the dragons (skin-turned Dwarrows) slain by each, and why, and how the dwarf Gotthormaz was kin to both of the latter; and the separate manners of their deaths, as told to him by Guher Govan Flowinghair, whom he described for the idiots' benefit as "my kinsman, who knows the tales of the Goths and Franks because his mother is Caesar's sister on the father's side as well as the mother's, and so he was fostered with their father his grandfather's Gewis kinsmen, and back when other Franks and Frisians came to Britain to swell the numbers of the Gewisse, they had scribes write down the tales of their heroes in good Latin for my kinsman and his ancestors to read._

> (Sherlock isn't quite sure why he hadn't scraped away the memory of long evenings of Guher Flowinghair telling him and Gildas and his own brother the lengthy and insanely complicated tale of his Wulfing Wolsung-and-otherwise Frankish kinsmen-by-another-complicated-method -- in deference to his buyers' intellectual limitations, he himself hadn't even troubled them with the Gothic and Herusk antecedents, the Roman connections, assorted intervening generations, the accursed ring, Attila the Hun, or the part where the Wolsung names likely sounded a bit different in Frankish than in Gothifrish -- although he knows perfectly well why he hasn't deleted it since: without the content, however inane, he won't be able to properly recall his godfather's intonations or indeed his voice as anything other than a pleasant background sound that might belong to anybody.)

 _"Neither of them were immortal," he finished, "or one of them would be ruling the Franks or at least some of their Salian tribes this very day, wouldn't they."_

 _The three idiots stood there blinking (fortunately, by this time Peretur had been feeling enough himself again to stalk over to the stream and start washing himself off) until one had finally said "So does that mean we'll revive if our heads are hewn off?"_

 _"Wrong." He had not yet come to despair of the educability of the better part of mankind, then, and after a moment condescended to explain "Decapitation will kill almost anything out there -- well, except for certain denizens of the British Isles -- but certainly including you idiots. If Sigwarthaz had been Immortal as -- we are immortal, he'd still have died of that blow, but likely his back would have healed of its breaking in the Wer-Wolf's dying struggles, and so his wife wouldn't have needed to be sure and get him to die a hero, or whatever ridiculous thing it is that you believe."_

 _The idiot backhanded him for that (unsurprising, but disappointing nevertheless); another said "Wait, you're from the British Isles, aren't you? Didn't the crew of _Wave-Striker _say they'd brought you back from the shores of the Walish?"_

 _"Of course he is," jumps-to-conclusions put in. "He just said his kinsman's mother was Kisar's sister on the father's side as well as the mother's, so his own mother must be Kisar's sister on the mother's side alone -- "_

 _Peretur might have deduced that he'd phrased his statement as he had because he'd still had the Bran-cultist's statement in the back of his mind, but he was too busy boggling about the idiot's ability to induce a mountain from no real data whatsoever._

 _" -- and Kisar, as all men know, is the king of the Walish, who live in the British Isles and south of them in the lands Hlodovekaz*** claims."_

 _"I'll bet no one else has a king's sister-son for a thrall," Idiot One said proudly. "Even if he is a weedy, mouthy sort of specimen."_

 _"No, Ingeldaz-King -- the one his nephews killed to win back the Danes' kingship -- had a couple of Saxon king's sister's sons for thralls after that raid Starkathaz the Old shamed him into," Idiot Three argued. "But he was just a Saxon king, and Kisar is the King of the Walish."_

 _By an effort of will, Peretur managed not to mention his mother the Augustus, or the Augustus in the East, or whatever claim the Franks and the Goths and the other Goths and whatever-that-other-one-was might have to the Empire between the East and Northwest, as it seemed unlikely to add anything useful to the discussion._

 _"Starkathaz the Old isn't. Old, I mean," Idiot One let himself be sidetracked. "Is he like we are?"_

 _"I don't know. He certainly seems to be hale and strong... "_

 _"Why don't you meet him," Peretur snorted, "and find out?"_

 _With any luck, they'd irritate this Starkathaz even more than they irritated him, and he could be rid of them without every steading in the Chersonese after him for a killer thrall._

 _"So!" Idiot Two finally got in, staring Peretur full in the face. "Will you die if your head's cut off?"_

 _"If one of you cuts my head off," Peretur said slowly and very, very carefully, "I will eat him alive."_

 _After all, none of them had drunk another Immortal's Quickening-force, and Guher's mother had fed her own life-force into him to keep him alive long enough to grow up when he was young, so in the end it had to depend on whose stubborn will to live was stronger -- and did it come down to sheer stoneheaded stubbornness, Peretur (Anniannioc [Guher]) would give anyone half the course and a handicap and still come out ahead._

(Sherlock still could, even if his mother does say now that Caledonia's thrown up someone nearly as bad.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

>   
> _* **who ever heard[...]?** : to be fair, this was several years before King Ingeldaz's half-Dane brother's son built possibly the most famous noise pollution venue in Western literature._   
> 
> 
>   
> _** **Isquaish** : around the time the Northmen split off from the West Germans, the latter separated into three groups that spoke markedly different dialects. That of the Irminans eventually did a couple of loop-de-loops, stood on its head, and became Old High German; that of the Ingwaians turned into Saxon and English and Fries (Frysk); and between them the remaining Isquaians (mistranscribed as Istwaians -- well, "Istvaeones") eventually formed the coalition of the Franks._   
> 
> 
>   
> _*** **Hlodovekaz** : he probably called himself Chlodovech, history usually has him down as Clovis, and he was the first Frankish king to make himself king of all the other Franks. In our world, he also conquered all of the isolated and leftover province of Gallia Belgica.)_   
> 


End file.
